Sojourn
by Nightwind
Summary: Desperate times call for desperate measures. And, for Kitt, that means taking a bit of a field trip. You know, getting a chance to see how everyone else on the planet lives. Yeah, you know what I mean, don't you? Yep. That.
1. Chapter 1

_Sorry, __all__ ye__ good __folks __who__ have__ me__ on__ Author__ Alert.__ This__ is__ another__ not-Transformers__ story. __Don__'__t__ hurt__ me!__ I__ can__'__t__ help __it __that __Brain __has __stomped __off __and__ gone__ on __a__ serious,__ slightly__ alarming,__ and_ definitely _all-consuming_ Knight Rider _bender__…_

_So,__ if __you__'__re__ reading __this __and __you__'__ve __never __read __anything__ written__ by __me __before__ – __which __probably __means __that __you _aren't _a __Transformers__ fan__ – __then__ you __need __to __know __one__ thing __about __me, __or __at __least __about __one __thing __that __I __like __to __do __in __my __writing. __That __would __be__ that, __for__ some __god-awful __reason __that __I __can__'__t __explain __for __the __life __of __me, __I __like__ to __play __with __things __that __are __tired,__ overdone, __and__ clichéd. __I __like __to __spin__ such __things __and __create __a __story __that __readers __end __up __liking __even__ though__ the __story __is, __at __heart, __tired, __overdone, __and __clichéd. __Or__ at __least __that__'__s __my __goal. __I __probably __don__'__t __succeed __as__ often __as__ I__'__d __like __with __the __whole__ "__readers__ like __it__" __part, __but__…__I__'__ve __apparently __had __my __moments,__ on__ occasion._

_Be__ warned __that __this __story __is __a __fine __example __of__ the __above. __Generally, __this__ stuff __occurs __to __Brain, __and __I __dutifully __write __it __all __down,__ and __then __I __sit __on __it __for __a __while __and __decide __if __it__'__s __just __too__ embarrassingly __stupid/fangirl __to __share. __In __the __case __of__ this __story, __that __was __a __tough __call __to __make __for __a __couple __of __different__ reason__. __But __as__ you __can __see, __I__'__m __going __ahead __and __posting __it. __*gulp* __I __should __say__ that,__ while __it__ has__ its __lighter __moments __here __and __there __because__ every __long, __non-comedic __story __has __to __have __them,__ this __story __has__ a__ far __more __serious __tone __than __the __little __series __of _Knight Rider_ vignettes __that __I__'__ve __been __posting __lately. __(And __that __I__'__ll __continue__ posting__ so __long __as__ they __smack __me __in __the __cerebrum; __I__ have __the __next __one __half-done.)__ Also __be__ warned __that __this __is, __indeed, __long._

_Finally, do be warned that this story introduces no less than five original characters, so there's some necessary exposition to introduce them. One of the five has a starring role in this particular story, rather out of necessity, and you "meet" her right off the bat. (She's quite fun for me because I have to do Serious Research, Yo™ in order to make the stuff that she says and does throughout the story at least remotely realistic and believable. Given that doing research activates the happy center of Brain, this is a good thing. Even when such research involves watching icky things on video. Ew.) Next, one of the five OCs is a dog. (Hey, dogs can be characters, too! Just ask Lassie.) Yet another of the five is…well…dead. Sort of. The final two are a gay couple, so if that sort of thing freaks you out, you have been warned. (Don't worry. There's no hanky-panky of any sort in this story, unless you count a kiss on the cheek as hanky-panky. But do beware of flying innuendos on occasion. Not to mention one…er, proposition. *chortle* Those, along with a bit of stray mild language here and there, earned this thing its rating.)_

_Anyway, the reason these characters exist is that I have vague notions of writing a prequel/sequel or two to this story, so I guess Brain has gone and invented its own little universe to play in, in which these OCs play a part. Mostly, the characters exist for the purpose of broadening Kitt's horizons, giving him more characters to learn from and sort of bounce off of. It's something that I think he'd need, from a more "realistic" point of view, although I completely understand why the show itself was tightly focused and constrained. However, rest assured that none of these OCs are 1) "cleverly" disguised author inserts or 2) will ever be a romantic interest for any of the not-OCs. I don't do that!_

…_Well, __OK, __I_ do _do __that. __Or __at __least __I __did __it __once, __for __reasons __pertaining __to __the __whole __liking-to-mess-around-with-clichés__ thing.__ But __I__'__m__ not __doing __that __here. __Swear. __Scout__'__s __honor.__:)_

_So, off we go, then..._

* * *

><p>The photograph and the dry physical description didn't capture her at all. If nothing else, it was one thing to read in the description that she was a hair under five feet tall and weighed ninety-seven pounds, quite another to see and to appreciate exactly how tiny that was for an adult woman. She moved lightly and quickly, probably a habit born of having to hurry to keep up with the longer strides of people who were all generally taller than she was. She was pale-skinned, which wasn't surprising for a person who likely didn't have much opportunity to see the sun, given the demands of her occupation. But her most distinguishing feature was her hair, which the photograph didn't capture at all. It was a long, thick, wildly curly cascade of chestnut, some of it messily tamed into a thick braid that dangled over one of her shoulders like a climbing rope, still more flying chaotically free behind her, catching the intermittent just-past-daybreak breeze.<p>

In short, when Michael Knight conjured up a mental image of what a respected neurosurgeon should look like, the image that his mind generated did not at all resemble the tiny, fragile-looking girl-woman at whom he was currently staring.

Michael watched her as she made her way across the hospital parking lot toward him. In addition to her slight stature, she was rather young. She had been a child prodigy, with an IQ that was off the scale. But unlike many before her who had cracked under the prodigy label and the heavy burden of pressure and expectations that naturally went along with it, this prodigy had lived up to her potential. At the ripe old age of thirty-two, she was a neurosurgeon with twelve years of experience already under her belt, and she had become known amongst the medical community of Southern California as the person to see when there was no hope. She was, so it was said, a miracle worker.

Michael needed nothing less than a miracle.

So, as she drew within range of Devon's beloved red convertible Mercedes, Michael opened the driver's side door and pushed his way out of the vehicle, drawing himself up to his full height, which was downright towering in comparison to hers, as he did so. When she was just a pace or two away from the car, he called out to her, not loudly enough to startle her, but loudly enough to get her attention.

"Dr. Jessica Macintyre?"

As Michael spoke, Dr. Macintyre had been poking around in the oversized bag that she had slung haphazardly over her shoulder, not watching where she was going. Reflexively, she gasped and her gazed jerked in Michael's direction as she heard her name spoken. She frowned, slowing her pace, puzzled at being hailed by name by a complete stranger. She was obviously uncertain about the wisdom of doing so, but she slowed to a halt just on the other side of Devon's car, deliberately keeping the vehicle between herself and Michael. In apparent confusion tinged with not a little wariness, she answered, "Yes?"

She was close enough now that Michael could see more detail. Large, dark eyes seemed to leap at him from out of her small, heart-shaped face. A smattering of dark freckles splashed across her cheekbones and along the length of her slightly crooked nose, the latter a result of a car accident she'd experienced when she was a child, according to the information that an unusually-thorough-even-for-him Kitt had provided to Michael about her. The freckles made her appear younger than she was, as did the fact that she wore no hint of make-up that Michael could detect. Still, she carried herself with dignity and confidence, which tended to draw the eye toward her despite her delicate, almost doll-like tininess. It fleetingly occurred to Michael that developing such an air had likely been a necessity in order to be taken seriously, given the contradiction between her age and her profession as well as her smallness, which was such that virtually everyone was forced to look down on her.

She was still staring warily up at Michael's face, squinting slightly into the rising sun behind him, waiting for him to say something. Not wanting to spook her, Michael leaned with his elbows against the roof of the convertible that stood between them, laying his forearms against it and clasping his hands together in a loose, non-threatening manner that kept both of them plainly visible to her at all times. He was attempting a casual air despite the urgency of his mission to see and to speak to her, to convince her. Given that the other two possible candidates had ultimately refused his offer, she was their last hope.

And perhaps she was their best hope, after all. She was by far Kitt's favored candidate; Michael had approached the other two first, over his partner's vehement protests, merely because they were both much older than Dr. Macintyre was, each with more years of surgical experience than Dr. Macintyre had been alive. That quality alone had made Michael far more comfortable with them, but Kitt had eloquently argued that in this particular case, a surplus of experience could be more of a hindrance than an asset, that intellectual flexibility, ingenuity, creativity, and the capacity for a whole lot of outside-the-box thinking were far more important for the project at hand. Kitt had pointed out that prodigies, particularly those who were still young, tended to have those necessary qualities in natural overabundance, while experience only tended to whittle away at them over time, eventually imposing conformity and narrowness of thought.

Kitt's arguments, for all that they had been understandably impassioned, were also, as usual, very logical, and perhaps he had been right. He was usually right, after all. Either way, they were running out of time. Michael had already spent – and ultimately wasted – three days tracking down and speaking with the other two candidates. So now, if Dr. Macintyre refused to help them, there simply wasn't time to find and speak to more candidates. And then…

Michael refused to think about it. Instead, he focused on his goal.

"My name is Michael Knight," he said genially to the tiny woman standing on the other side of the car from him, "and I have a business proposition for you."

She frowned at him, her brow creasing delicately.

"Mr. Knight," she politely drawled, folding her arms over her chest, "I'm a surgeon, not a businesswoman."

Her voice was lower-pitched than Michael had expected it to be, given her size, and the words that she had spoken were liberally splashed with southern Alabama, where she'd been born and raised. Because his partner was an individual whom he in a sense knew only by voice, Michael had found himself over the years becoming more attuned to the tones and inflections of other people's voices, too, almost more so than to their facial expressions and body language. He noticed layers of nuances in voices now, intuitively felt the meaning in the tones and the silences and the spaces between the two, sometimes more often than in the actual words that someone said. Voices had gained the power to conjure images and evoke strange connotations in Michael's mind, and in Dr. Macintyre's case, he found himself thinking that the color of her voice matched the color of her hair. Both evoked dark, well-aged, well-oiled woods, the sort that usually dwelled in dusty Victorian libraries.

"I know that, Doctor," he said, flashing one of the more charming smiles in his repertoire at her. Kitt had long ago dubbed it the "Lady-Killer Smile" because it invariably got Michael whatever he wanted from any given female of the species. Unfortunately, it seemed to have little effect on its intended target this time. She just tilted her head at him, her lips pursed speculatively, her overall expression a mixture of curiosity and puzzlement.

Michael sighed, changed tactics, and added, "Let me put it this way: I know of a patient who needs your help. Your expertise. In fact… He needs a miracle, and the word on the street is that you're the woman to see for those."

This time, Dr. Macintyre blinked at him, her eyebrows rising rather than creasing in a frown.

"Well, in that case," she replied after a beat, "I have office hours tomorrow afternoon if no emergency arises. I don't know if there are any openings available, but I'll give y'all the number of my office. Y'all can call my receptionist, and if—"

"No!" Michael interrupted abruptly and much too loudly, involuntarily smacking his clasped hands against the roof of the Mercedes.

Much of the urgency, the pent-up desperation, that Michael was feeling bled into his voice, pouring itself into that one strident syllable. All of it brought Dr. Macintyre up short, and her demeanor, which had begun to soften, was instantly and understandably wary again, more than it had been before. Michael flinched; he hadn't wanted that. It was, in fact, the _last_ thing he'd wanted.

"I'm sorry," he immediately apologized. "I'm sorry, Doctor. It's just that the…the patient is…a very close friend of mine. He can't come to your office. And I can't wait until tomorrow afternoon. Please, just hear me out. Today. As soon as possible. After that, if you ask me to go away, I swear to you that you'll never see me again."

Dr. Macintyre stared at him, squinting slightly. Whether she squinted because she was considering what he'd said or simply because the steadily rising sun was in her face, Michael didn't know. He hoped it was the former. A moment later, she blinked at him again, a long, slow blink.

And then she sighed, swallowed visibly, and said, "All right. All right, I'll listen to whatever it is that y'all have to say. But I'm not promising anything."

Michael flashed another smile at her, this one unburdened with ulterior motives.

"That's all I ask," he said. After a beat, he added, "Are you just getting off work?"

Dr. Macintyre blinked yet again, this time at the unexpected change of subject, and she answered almost absently, "I just got out of surgery. Some gang kid whom the police want for killing another gang kid but who took a bullet to the head himself yesterday."

Then it was Michael's turn to blink as he responded, nonplussed, "Oh."

"Why?" she asked him, frowning.

"Well," Michael answered slowly, "I just thought we could go somewhere to talk. Somewhere not a parking lot. Get some breakfast, maybe? My treat? I mean, if you _want_ to eat right after surgery, that is…"

The distasteful look on his face was apparently amusing; Dr. Macintyre's own face suddenly split into a huge grin. She laughed and, unlike her speaking voice, her laugh was bright, sunny, and very girlish.

After she collected herself a moment later, she drawled, "I assure you, Mr. Knight—"

"Michael, please," Michael interrupted.

"Michael," she echoed with a conceding nod, and then she continued, "I assure you that I'm well past the point where performing surgery makes me lose my appetite, much less my dinner. I was in that OR for sixteen hours, and I'm _starving_. Free food sounds good to me."

"Great," Michael responded, smiling at her again.

"That said, my mama taught me never to get into cars with strangers," Dr. Macintyre continued. "So I'm not getting into that car with y'all. Even though it's a _really_ nice car," she added admiringly, her eyes appreciatively tracing the Mercedes's lines.

Michael chuckled, thinking,_You __ain__'__t __seen __nothin__' __yet__._ Aloud, he said, "Your mama was a very wise woman, then. I'll meet you somewhere…?"

She considered that for a moment, squinting up at him again, and then she jerked her chin off to the left.

"There's a diner five or six blocks that way, up on the right-hand side of the street," she answered. "They make these enormous, greasy, artery-clogging breakfasts, and unlike most places out here in godforsaken La La Land, they actually know how to make grits. I'll meet you there in…half an hour? I have a quick errand to run first."

"Greasy and artery-clogging, you say?" Michael answered, his eyebrows lifting with interest. "Sounds great. It's a date."

Dr. Macintyre snorted lightly, an enigmatic half-smile on her face.

"I'll provide the chaperone," she said lightly, and then she walked past Devon's car, purposefully heading toward the back of the parking lot. The loose portion of her hair randomly caught the breeze in untidy tendrils of wayward ringlets as she went.

Bemused, Michael shook his head after her and then folded himself down into the Mercedes. He tried to quell the flare of hope that he suddenly felt deep down in his gut. It was, he scolded himself, much too early for any kind of optimism. Still, as he pulled out of the hospital parking lot, he couldn't hold back the smile that spread across his face.


	2. Chapter 2

Michael had had no idea what he had expected a well-respected neurosurgeon to drive…but an old albeit well-maintained 60s-era compact silver Toyota definitely hadn't been high on the list of possibilities. He was sitting on the hood of the Mercedes, trying to enjoy the early-morning sunshine and the cool, crisp early-April air, trying not to count the minutes as they slipped by much too quickly, when Dr. Macintyre's car turned into the diner's parking lot and then pulled into the parking spot next to his. With not a little amusement, Michael noticed that her car's license plate read, "BRAINZ."

She must have caught the perplexed expression that he was aiming at her car as she climbed out of it because she frowned at him severely and demanded indignantly, almost defensively, "What?"

Michael started and then answered, "Nothing. Guess I just expected something…flashier, is all."

She rolled her eyes at him.

"Right," she groused with a sigh. "Because all surgeons are fabulously wealthy. We all live on huge gated estates, we use rolls of hundred-dollar bills for fire kindling, and we all own a fleet of Rolls-Royces, one for each day of the week."

"Welllll…" Michael temporized.

"I'll have y'all know," Dr. Macintyre informed him, "that I live in a little two-bedroom house in an average, un-swanky neighborhood. On top of a mortgage, my husband and I are drowning in combined seven-figure student loans and will be for the next thirty years or so. Plus, y'all wouldn't _believe_ the cost of malpractice insurance in my field."

"No, I don't suppose I would," Michael answered neutrally, and then he watched, surprised, as she suddenly leaned down to fondly pat the hood of her car with one tiny hand.

"Besides, even if I _was_ fabulously wealthy," she continued quietly, as if she hadn't heard him, "I wouldn't replace her. I've had her since I was nineteen, and we've been through a lot together. So, I promised her that I'd keep her with me until one or the other of us falls apart at the seams." She flashed a self-conscious and suddenly pretty little smile up at Michael and said, "I guess it's kind of a silly attitude to have about a car, huh?"

Michael smiled back at her, fondly but not a little sadly.

"Not at all," he answered quietly. "_Believe_ me, I know the feeling."

At that, she squinted up at him, sharply this time, frowning curiously as she caught a glimpse of the sudden melancholy in his eyes. Avoiding the question in her gaze, Michael slid down off the hood of Devon's car…and then he cried out involuntarily as an enormous black head bristling with a full array of gleaming white teeth exploded at him from the open back window of the doctor's car. The bark alone was terrifying, thunderously deep and snarling roughly. Adrenaline racing, Michael reared backwards, unthinkingly flinging himself against the side of the Mercedes.

"Bogie, _down_," Dr. Macintyre was saying mildly meanwhile, and the dog – the biggest Rottweiler that Michael had ever seen – subsided with one last greatly displeased growl aimed in his direction. The dog took up most of the back of Dr. Macintyre's car and had to be at least twenty pounds heavier than she was. Dr. Macintyre glanced at Michael, noted that the color had completely drained from his face, and she teased, "Told you I would provide the chaperone."

In response, Michael just gave her a wide-eyed, ashen look, at which she chuckled.

"Oh, not _really_. That's just my baby boy, Bogie. That errand I had to run was to pick him up at his sitter's," she said. At the questioning look that Michael shot at her, she shrugged and explained, "I can't leave him alone when my husband's at work and I'm in surgery for eighteen hours or so. He's just a puppy."

"A _puppy_?" Michael echoed incredulously, gawking at the dog who, although he had sat back on his massive haunches, was still giving Michael a look full of deep suspicion.

"Ten months old," Dr. Macintyre answered with a maternally-proud grin. "But don't worry. His bark is worse than his bite…although I guess that the guy who tried to break into my house a few weeks back might have a different opinion on that subject."

"I…can imagine," Michael answered unsteadily, still eyeing the dog warily. His heart rate had yet to settle back into its usual pace. "You are just full of surprises, Dr. Macintyre," he added, shaking his head slightly at her.

"Jessica," she corrected, still smiling with amusement at his expense. At the look Michael gave her, she added with a breezy shrug, "Hey, y'all buy me food, y'all get to forego the formalities for the duration. But if you ever call me 'Jessie,' I swear to God I'll sic Bogie on you," she warned. "I _hate_ 'Jessie.'"

"I'll bear that in mind," Michael answered with a fervent nod as he edged carefully around the Bogie-possessed Toyota, and the two headed into the diner.

* * *

><p>They were halfway through breakfast when a pager sounded. Jessica sighed and rolled her eyes, automatically assuming that it was hers. She started to rummage around in the pocket of her jacket to find it, but her reflexive movements stilled as a look of what was obviously intense dread settled over Michael's face and he hastily pulled his own pager out of the pocket of the black leather jacket that he'd draped over the back of his chair. Jessica frowned at him first in puzzlement and then in concern, once she saw him blanch considerably as he checked the callback number and then as she heard the curse that he muttered under his breath. He gave Jessica a very apologetic look, explaining that he had to make a call.<p>

"I understand," Jessica murmured, still frowning at him. Given her line of work, she more than understood the necessity of responding to ill-timed pages. With a grateful nod, Michael pushed himself away from the table and made a beeline for the pay phone in the diner's lobby.

Jessica could tell that whatever Michael was hearing on the other end of the call that he made, it wasn't good news. His handsome face almost immediately creased into an intensely worried scowl, and he spat obviously terse words into the phone's receiver, words that she couldn't quite hear over the ambient noise in the restaurant.

Still, Jessica was thankful for the interruption. It gave her time to try to assimilate some of what she'd heard so far while she simultaneously worked on assimilating more of the heaping mound of breakfast on the plate in front of her. Because what Michael had told her…

She had already decided that it was all simply far too outlandish to be a lie; the tired adage that truth was stranger than fiction was often true. Michael had told her about the organization that he worked for and about the work that he did for it. And then he had eventually told her that his partner in that work was an advanced artificial intelligence. Moments before his pager had sounded, he had begun to describe it – him – in more detail.

What little Michael had told her had brought Jessica up short. Her husband, Phillip, worked in the forefront of the software engineering field, and she knew that what Michael had begun to describe to her was something about which he rhapsodically fantasized. She also knew that the existence of such a thing was impossible with current technology. Or so Phillip maintained, at least. But maybe he was wrong about that. Or maybe Michael Knight was just a very inventive liar. But for some strange reason, Jessica found herself inclined toward thinking that the former was in fact the truth. What, after all, would be the point of fabricating such a crazy story? Besides, for some reason, she felt inclined to trust Michael Knight. She wasn't sure why. It was just a feeling. An instinct, perhaps.

Maybe it was the terrible earnest in Michael's entire demeanor that had convinced her. Or maybe it was the sadness and the hint of desperation that was shadowing his striking blue eyes and that had softened and occasionally thrown a telling tremble into his voice every now and then as he'd spoken to her. She'd seen all of it before, hundreds of times before, in those with a terminally ill loved one, those who'd come to her because they had heard of her "miracle worker" reputation, because every other surgeon they had consulted had told them that there was no hope and that a miracle was, indeed, exactly what they needed.

Michael had that same look about him. He'd had it even when he'd first hailed her in the hospital parking lot. He'd obviously been doing his best to hide it then, but she'd recognized it instantly. She had long practice at doing so, and she had developed a certain sixth sense for it. That look had been the main reason that she'd stopped to speak with Michael in the first place, and it was certainly why she had agreed, against otherwise better judgment, to meet and speak further with him. That look pulled at her, called to her like a Siren, just as it always had.

Still, Jessica was unsettled. She was unsettled because whatever Michael Knight so desperately wanted and needed from her, it was rather obvious to her that it had something to do with the AI, whom he'd almost tearfully described as not only his partner but also his closest friend, as completely insane as that sounded to her. She could imagine some awkward, socially inept nerd having a computer as a best friend, but not someone who looked like Michael, a man who was obviously very aware that his face and smile were potent weapons fully capable of charming the pants off of anything that moved. Still, assuming that what he'd said was true, she honestly couldn't imagine why he needed _her_, as opposed to someone like her husband. She was contemplating just that question, repeatedly turning it over in her mind and finding no logical, rational answer to it, when Michael suddenly returned to the table.

The desperate earnest was back in his eyes, only it was increased at least tenfold as he leaned down toward her, until his face was only inches from hers. Jessica had to fight the urge to rear back from him in alarm as his intense gaze practically welded itself to and then started to bore deeply into her startled, wide-eyed one.

"I have to leave," Michael said to her very quietly but with firm intensity, "and I want you to come with me."

Jessica blinked at him, speechless for a moment, and then she babbled, "Michael, I…I just don't think that would be—"

"Jessica, _please_," Michael pleaded, stridently interrupting her protest. His voice was somehow even more intense, those pretty blue eyes flashing at her now. "I promise you that I'll explain more, everything that I can, on the way, but we have to leave _now_. Just…please."

Jessica swallowed and, almost unconsciously, the words "all right" spilled out of her mouth, barely above a whisper. The words momentarily horrified her, but she found herself pushing away from the table anyway. Standing up. Watching, dumbfounded, as Michael tossed a much-too-large wad of cash onto the table. Then she was following him out of the diner as if she had no free will of her own, trotting fast in order to keep up with his much-longer strides. Still on unthinking autopilot, she grabbed her bag and pulled Bogie out of her car, quickly transferring both to the back of Michael's Mercedes. Then she found herself settling numbly into the red car's plush leather passenger seat as Michael hurriedly got behind the wheel, fired up the car's engine, and then tore out of the parking lot like a bat out of hell, complete with screeching, smoking tires.

She could have sworn that she heard Michael softly say something like, "Hang on, kid," as they headed for the freeway entrance at breakneck speed. Somehow, Jessica knew that Michael wasn't talking to her.


	3. Chapter 3

For some reason, Jessica had assumed that Michael would take her to some kind of private clinic. The high-end Mercedes that he was driving indicated that he had access to money, likely a lot of it, and highly moneyed individuals didn't tend to bother with hospitals meant for mere mortals, instead maintaining and staffing well-equipped private facilities for their own and their family's use. So, as Michael drove the Mercedes through an open wrought-iron gate and then proceeded much too swiftly up a long, paved, tree-lined driveway that had to be a mile long and that reeked of still more money, Jessica expected to see something that resembled a clinic coming into view. For some reason, they all tended to look the same.

She didn't quite expect to see a sprawling mansion, but that was what she found herself staring at, nevertheless. The more closely they approached it, the bigger and sprawlier it became. It was impeccably maintained, too, both the building itself as well as its surrounding grounds and gardens, which from what she could see as they flew past them were expansive, manicured, and beautiful.

Jessica still had little idea of why she was there. Michael had said that he would explain more, and he had tried to do so. But the speed and the manner in which he had been driving, weaving in and out of traffic and taking sharp curves much too quickly, had inevitably attracted the attention of law enforcement. Michael had had to devote all of his attention to eluding them, leaving no room for conversation and explanations.

Jessica wasn't certain how Michael had managed to elude the police because she'd had her eyes screwed tightly shut during the whole episode. She'd spent the time fervently praying that they would make it to wherever they were going in one piece, praying that there wasn't another serious car accident in her immediate future; the one she'd been in when she was seven had been quite enough for her. The pounding of her heart had almost drowned out the wailing of the sirens behind and occasionally in front of them, and she knew only that there had been many sharp turns, the gravitational forces of which had repeatedly mashed her body against the door of the car. The sound of screeching tires was still echoing in her head, and the acrid smell of burning rubber was still eating away at her sinuses. But Michael was obviously very good at what he did; they remained in one piece, and soon the sirens were gone, left far behind.

Shortly after that, they had arrived here. Wherever and whatever here was.

Once Michael slewed the sleek red Mercedes to a halt in the circular drive in front of the mansion's main entrance, Jessica numbly pushed open the car's passenger door and climbed unsteadily out of the vehicle, deeply rattled from the drive. She turned and grabbed Bogie's leash to pull him out of the car, too. And then, without further ado, she and her dog were unceremoniously ushered into the mansion, Michael pulling insistently on her elbow to urge her along. He was moving at a fast walk; Jessica had to jog to keep up with him, and Bogie trotted happily enough alongside her. As soon as they burst through the front door, Michael called out "Bonnie?" and a woman's voice distantly answered, "In here, Michael."

The interior of the building was as beautiful as the outside was, but Jessica hardly had the opportunity to appreciate any of it as she was ushered down a narrow hallway and then through an open archway that led into a small but elegantly furnished and decorated room that featured a shiny black baby grand piano in one corner and a bank of tall windows overlooking one of the gardens. Jessica automatically shortened Bogie's leash so that he couldn't go exploring; she didn't see any item in the room that didn't look antique, irreplaceable, and hideously expensive, and the puppy had a distressing habit of zeroing in on expensive things and then doing his best to destroy them.

There was a woman in the room, too. Bonnie, so Jessica assumed. She was tall, wearing a rumpled lab jacket, and she sported a very off-kilter brunette ponytail from which tendrils of hair were randomly escaping. She had been pacing restlessly, and her back had been to Jessica and Michael as they entered the room, but she stilled and spun toward them as soon as she heard them. She had a beautiful face, Jessica noted, for all that it was haggard, pale, and hollow-eyed. She was quite obviously exhausted.

Immediately, before Michael could say anything, Bonnie held up a hand at him and announced, "He's all right for now. He slipped quite a bit, but the cascade stopped, and he's stable for the moment."

While Jessica frowned in confusion, Michael let out a huge sigh, his entire body sagging in obvious relief as he did so. He moved toward and then sprawled himself carelessly across the nearest chair as the adrenaline that had obviously been fueling him abruptly fled his body.

Leaning forward to bury his face in his hands, Michael murmured a deeply fervent, "Thank God," and then lifted his head, smiled wanly at Bonnie, and asked, "How's he doing?"

Bonnie shrugged tiredly and answered, "He's scared to death, and he's asking for you every other second."

Michael nodded, obviously not surprised at either bit of information.

"Bonnie," he said, gesturing at Jessica, "this is Dr. Jessica Macintyre. Jessica, Dr. Bonnie Barstow." While the two women nodded and smiled politely at each other, Michael explained to Bonnie, "I'm afraid I haven't been able to tell her much yet, between that call and the police attention I attracted on the way over here, but she agreed to come here with me. I know you're real busy, Bon, but could you…?"

"I'll fill her in," Bonnie said quietly, nodding and smiling at Michael reassuringly. "I'm waiting for some data to compile, anyway. Go to him. Beware of grease monkeys, though."

Michael rolled his eyes and muttered, "Aw, man…"

"Hey," Bonnie replied with a shrug, "if anyone other than you can keep him entertained and distracted, it's them."

Michael muttered something under his breath that Jessica couldn't quite catch, and then he bounced to his feet, took a second to give Jessica a smile and her shoulder a quick squeeze that was both thankful and reassuring, and then he turned and disappeared at a dead run. Jessica watched him leave, listened to his running footsteps recede down the hallway, and then turned back to Bonnie. She didn't know what to say, and her uncertainty must have shown on her face because Bonnie gave her a sympathetic smile.

"Well," she said lightly. "I'm guessing that you're royally confused."

Jessica nodded and answered, her voice a little shaky, "That's putting it mildly."

Bonnie grimaced and replied ruefully, "Michael tends to have that effect on people, I'm afraid. Would you like to sit down?" she asked, gesturing at a nearby wingback chair that faced the bank of windows.

Jessica swallowed, glanced down at Bogie, and said, "Actually…Is there somewhere I can put Bogie? Um, that's him," she said, gesturing down at the Rottweiler who'd sat himself on his haunches next to her, looking around himself with keen interest. He twitched occasionally, obviously wanting to explore, but he sat quietly, as he'd been trained to do. "I had to bring him with me, but all the chewables and breakables in this room are making me nervous. I mean, he's generally well-behaved and he's housebroken now, but he's only a puppy, and…"

She was babbling nervously, and she realized it, so she let her voice trail off.

Bonnie, meanwhile, was staring at Bogie.

"That," she said, "is one big puppy."

"I know," Jessica answered almost ruefully, "and he's still not fully-grown. But my husband has a habit of working at night and…he makes me feel a bit safer when I'm all by myself."

Bonnie smiled and said, "I _totally_ understand. C'mon," she added. "There's a kennel and a dog yard outside where he'll have food and water and company. We can talk while we walk."

Jessica smiled gratefully and as they exited the room, she answered, "Walking sounds good, actually, after that drive over here."

"I can imagine," Bonnie answered with chuckle. "Michael knows what he's doing when he's behind the wheel of a car, but that doesn't mean that it's easy on a passenger's blood pressure."

"Or on her adrenaline levels," Jessica fervently agreed. "I'm still shaking," she added as Bonnie led the way out of the back of the mansion, through a set of French doors and onto a wide concrete terrace that overlooked a swimming pool on the right and a long rectangular reflecting pool directly ahead. Bonnie veered to the left, toward a short set of steps that led down to a large, partially shaded open patio and then out to the manicured lawn, and the two women and the dog began a leisurely stroll. It was mid-morning now, and the sun was bright and pleasantly warm, the sky clear, the breeze still cool but certainly not cold.

"So what did Michael actually manage to tell you?" Bonnie asked of Jessica after they'd walked in silence for a little while.

"That he works for some…foundation?" Jessica began. "I assume that's this place?"

Bonnie nodded, saying, "The Foundation for Law and Government. This is its headquarters, yes, although the building and the grounds serve other purposes as well. It was all owned by Wilton Knight."

"The eccentric, reclusive billionaire," Jessica said, nodding as she pulled up the mental file. "He died a number of years back, as I recall."

"Yes, he did," Bonnie confirmed. "Everything that happens here now is funded by his estate."

"And Michael is his…son?"

Unexpectedly, Bonnie burst out laughing, but she collected herself a second or two later and said, "Well, actually… In a manner of speaking, I suppose he is. Certainly, he's Wilton's…creation." Jessica shot an odd look at Bonnie at that, frowning at her. "Oh, it's a very long story," Bonnie explained. "And I'm sure you'll hear it eventually, if you choose to stay for…the duration. But it's not completely relevant to the issue at hand."

"Which is the AI," Jessica surmised. At Bonnie's surprised look, she smiled and added, "Michael _did_ tell me that he worked with an AI, and he even told me a little about him. He didn't have a chance to come out and say it in so many words, but I kind of read between the lines that the reason y'all wanted me here has something to do with him. Although I confess that I can't see why _I__'__d_ be needed as opposed to a computer engineer."

"Possibly," Bonnie answered with a smile and a shrug, "because we already have a fair number of those on staff. Me, for instance."

Jessica turned her head to lift her eyebrows at Bonnie.

"Oh," she responded mildly.

"My Ph.D is in Artificial Intelligence," Bonnie answered with a nod. "And there are more than a few other computer specialists in various fields lurking around here, too."

"Oh," Jessica repeated, completely baffled now. Blinking, her brow furrowing, she added, "Then I… Well, forgive me, but I _really_ don't understand why…"

"Why we need a neurosurgeon," Bonnie finished for her, nodding understandingly.

"Well…In short," Jessica replied, "yes."

Bonnie pulled in a sigh.

"I guess I should start at the beginning," she said. "Yes, Michael does work with an AI. His name is Kitt."

"A computer with a name?" Jessica asked, amused.

"Well," Bonnie allowed with a small and distinctly affectionate smile, "it's an acronym, actually…but it's become his name. And he's my baby. Or at least, I developed the…kernel of him. He was designed to learn and to grow and to adapt as he learned, and… Well, he's grown in ways that I, that _no __one_, could ever have anticipated. The vast majority of that growth is Michael's…fault." Bonnie paused then, and Jessica couldn't quite interpret the look in her eyes, but she saw tears forming before Bonnie shook herself with a sigh, and blinked away the incipient tears. "In short," she continued, back to business, "his and Michael's job is to bring to justice people whom the official agencies, even the FBI, can't or won't touch for whatever reason. Along the way, they tend to…help people, especially the victims of those untouchable people. Kitt was created with unique abilities that facilitate that work, and between him and Michael, they—"

Jessica blinked.

"Why?" she found herself suddenly asking.

"Why what?"

Jessica shrugged, shaking her head at the same time. "I guess I'm not understanding why Wilton Knight's estate would be funding such a thing," she said.

Bonnie smiled and answered, "Let's just say that he had very personal reasons. Revenge, for one."

"Ouch," Jessica responded.

"Mmmm," Bonnie agreed. "Anyway," she continued, "six days ago, Michael and Kitt were just starting a case, one that only began in the first place because of an anonymous tip the Foundation received. Now, one of those abilities of Kitt's, because he's computer-based himself, is that he can access computer systems and databases, getting into and out of them without being detected, if stealth is necessary. As you might imagine, it's a very useful ability in his and Michael's line of work. But this time… Apparently, someone anticipated his arrival. Or, very possibly, they led him right where they wanted him to go."

"The person who tipped you," Jessica surmised, nodding. "A booby trap."

"That's the prevailing theory, yes," Bonnie answered quietly, solemnly. She paused, and continued, "Without being too boringly technical, an invasive subroutine was introduced into one of Kitt's peripheral systems which then began to…burrow. It has to have been coded by someone who knows him well because it breached his perimeter defenses fairly easily, which unfortunately was all the foothold it needed. And what it's doing is…" She paused, and the tears were back, but she refused to let them fall. She took a deep breath, blinked rapidly a few times, and then soldiered on. "It's attempting to get to and copy his base programming. He's fighting it, has been fighting it for six days now, but the effort is draining him, and as he grows weaker, it grows stronger. As it gets stronger, it burrows deeper and backs Kitt into a smaller and smaller corner. Early this morning, it breached a another level of his security, got at his secondary systems, and when Kitt tried to push it back out, it triggered a cascade of systems failures. I truly thought we were going to lose him. That's when I paged Michael because I knew that he'd want to be here if he could be when…when…"

As Bonnie's voice trailed off in distress, as she fought tears again, Jessica reached across the distance between them and laid a supportive hand on her forearm. Bonnie gave her a watery, thankful smile in return, and Jessica suddenly understood something of the effect that that phone call had had on Michael.

"But not long before you got here," Bonnie continued after she'd collected herself, "the failures just…stopped. I suppose it would have been counterproductive to destroy him before they get what they want," she said bitterly. "But now the subroutine is more deeply entrenched and Kitt's been drastically weakened. Which was obviously the purpose of the cascade, just a big distraction. And he's…scared to death, like I said."

"That's…understandable," Jessica whispered, even though she couldn't even begin to wrap her mind around the concept of a scared-to-death computer. But, putting that particular issue aside for the moment, she asked, "So…What's the point of this…attack?"

Bonnie sighed.

"Whatever code the subroutine manages to copy," she explained, "it uses Kitt's own encrypted communications protocols to transmit to a masked location that, so far, we haven't been able to trace. And then it corrupts the original code, so it's like Kitt's being eaten alive. And if we don't stop whoever's doing this, they will essentially have a clone of Kitt's programming to do with as they please. That's potentially very dangerous, considering his capabilities. And I haven't been able to purge the subroutine without it reaching out and trying to take something vital along with it," Bonnie bitterly finished just as they reached the dog yard.

Silently, Jessica opened the yard's gate, walked in with Bogie, let him off his leash, and watched him run joyously off toward a small group of other dogs, all large Dobermans from what she could tell from a distance, which she guessed were the estate's guard dogs. Just as silently, she turned back, closed the gate behind her, looked at Bonnie, and by unspoken agreement they headed back toward the house.

"Isn't there anything that can be done?" Jessica quietly asked after they'd walked in silence for a few moments.

Bonnie nodded.

"There are two options, actually," she answered. "The much simpler one is to reinitialize him, which would return him to the state that he was in when he was born, so to speak. Doing so would restore his base programming, and the restoration process should wipe the foreign subroutine."

"Like…reformatting the memory," Jessica interpreted, trying to summon what little she knew of computers. Despite being married to a software engineer for almost ten years, not much of his knowledge of the infernal things had rubbed off on her. And that was just the way she liked it.

"In a sense, yes," Bonnie confirmed with a nod. "That's assuming, of course, that the thing wouldn't be able to resist the reinitialization. But the thing is that Kitt's _not_ just a computer. Reinitializing him would destroy every heuristic adaptation that his neural nets have made during his lifetime. He'll be six in October, and all of those adaptations over the past five and a half years have shaped the individual that he's become, just as our life's experiences shape us. None of those experiences can ever be repeated exactly. We could preserve his raw memory data so that he'd remember the bare facts of what's happened to him during his lifetime, but that's not the same as preserving what he learned _from_ those experiences as he lived them, much less how he's incorporated that learning into himself, how it's changed him over time."

Jessica nodded thoughtfully. As a neurosurgeon, she understood all too well the aftereffects of forcing someone's brain to rewire itself, which she imagined was the biological equivalent of the technological process that Bonnie was describing.

"So," Bonnie concluded, "Option #1 boils down to nothing less than destroying the individual that Kitt has become and replacing him with someone else, someone with Kitt's knowledge and memories but not his…soul, for want of a better word. _None_ of us wants that, most of all Michael, and his opinion – along with Kitt's, of course – is the one that counts the most. So…it's really not an option at all."

Jessica nodded again to indicate her understanding. "So…?" she prompted.

"Sooooo," Bonnie answered with a long sigh, "that leaves us with Option #2. Which is _infinitely_ more complex. And it's where _you_ come in."

"Okaaaay," Jessica answered slowly. "And Option #2 is…?"

Bonnie answered, "Option #2 is to temporarily move Kitt somewhere else, somewhere completely isolated and safe, out of harm's way. We move everything that the subroutine hasn't already destroyed and everything that's essentially Kitt and that would be destroyed in a reinitialization. Then, we work on what's left behind. Hopefully, without having to worry about it damaging Kitt, we'll be able to get rid of the damned subroutine and we can then replaced the damaged software with clean copies. Then, once we find and, if I have my way, fry in boiling oil whoever's responsible for this so that it won't happen again, we move Kitt back where he's supposed to be, merge him with the restored programming, _et __voilá_! That's the plan, anyway…although it's very much easier said than done…"

Jessica blinked as Bonnie's voice trailed off. She was attempting to digest all that Bonnie had said, but she was finding herself rather stuck on Step One.

"Move Kitt…where?" she asked.

Bonnie smiled and answered, "Well, if this was about…oh…three or four years ago, I'd say that we would move him into the secure mainframe we have here on the premises. We used it during Kitt's development, and it's more or less completely cut off from the outside world, so he'd be safe there. But he's outgrown it, so to speak, both in storage capacity and in…maturity. It's not at all suitable for him anymore, so we'd have to build a new one. But even if we did that… He's used to being…mobile. He's used to interacting with people and with the world, used to experiencing good, bad, and ugly things, and then learning from those experiences. To cut him off from all of that for who knows how long…" She shook her head and concluded, "It would be nothing less than torture, and we're not going to make that mistake again, not if we can help it. Not if there's _any_ other possible alternative."

"Again?" Jessica asked, raising her eyebrows.

Bonnie sighed and said, "Another long and not completely relevant story, I'm afraid. But it's another that I'm sure you'll hear eventually if…"

"Ah," Jessica responded. "So…where _are_ y'all intending to move him, then?" she added after a moment of contemplation. "And please, for the love of God, what does all this have to do with _me_?"

Bonnie smiled mysteriously. They had reached the house again and were climbing the steps up onto the terrace.

"It'll probably be faster and easier to show you," she said, just as mysteriously.

Bonnie led Jessica back into the house then, through the same French doors through which they'd exited, and into the opulent main sitting room into which they fed. They went up the L-shaped grand staircase to the second floor, and then eventually into a long, doglegged hallway. Bonnie gave her a bit of a tour as they went, pointing at various doors.

"That's Devon Miles's office," she said. "He's the director of the Foundation, so he's my boss and Michael's and Kitt's boss and…a lot of other people's boss. He's out at the moment, making some…arrangements, but he should be back sometime this afternoon. And that's my room that I use when I'm here for overnights, and I'll be staying here until this situation…resolves. That's a bathroom. Storage closet. And that's Michael's room that he uses whenever he's here and not out there somewhere. If you know what's good for you, don't go in there. It's a biohazard. You'd think the man was still a teenager."

Jessica chuckled at that, and then they were at the end of the hall, which was brightly illuminated by a beautiful Palladian window complete with a cushioned window seat, flanked on both sides by built-in bookshelves that were full of old-looking volumes. They were standing in front of a heavy, dark-paneled door diagonally across the hall from Michael's room.

"Ah, here we are," Bonnie announced as she pushed open the door.

Jessica wasn't sure what she had been expecting, but she definitely hadn't been expecting a rather well-equipped private hospital room. It was cheerful for a hospital room, bright and airy, with potted and hanging plants and colorful, fragrant flower arrangements scattered about. A middle-aged woman – a nurse, Jessica guessed – was sitting in an armchair across the room from the doorway, reading. The room itself was large, with a bank of tall windows on one wall, beneath which sat a comfortable-looking overstuffed couch. On another wall, two sets of French doors led out to a balcony. The bank of windows above the couch was open to let in fresh, spring air, making the gauzy curtains flutter off and on, dancing to the rhythm of the intermittent breeze.

The hospital bed was placed against an interior wall. The foot of it faced the bank of windows on the opposite wall, but it was situated such that the occupant had a view out of the French doors as well. Except of course, that the occupant was unconscious.

Jessica moved toward the bed almost reflexively. The head of the bed was raised, and the man laying in it was still. He was hooked up to a ventilator, and the machine's quiet in-and-out susurrations filled the room. As Jessica approached more closely, she saw that he was young, at most twenty years old. He had a thick head of fine, wavy hair that was as inky black as a moonless night in the middle of winter, and it was all shaggy and overgrown. His skin was stretched tight across his face, revealing an underlying bone structure that Jessica estimated would be quite pretty if it was properly fleshed out. He had the waxy, grayish pallor of long-term hospital confinement, and his body was thin and frail, emaciated from lack of use.

Jessica glanced up at the bank of monitors mounted on the wall above the head of the bed, which were displaying readouts of all of his vital functions. She was fearing what she'd see, and she saw exactly what she feared that she'd see: Everything appeared to be operating as it should, except that all of the lines of the EEG were flat. The patient wasn't merely unconscious; he was brain dead. Frowning in confusion, Jessica said as much to Bonnie, who had also approached the bed, stopping to stand on the opposite side of it from Jessica.

"We know," Bonnie answered her quietly. "That's why he's here."

Jessica tore her gaze away from the monitors and then locked it with Bonnie's. Connections formed in her mind with their usual rapidity, and for a long moment, she could only gape at the other woman in sheer astonishment. When she finally found her voice, she could only manage a strained and slightly horrified whisper.

"You…You're…Y'all're going to put Kitt…in there," she managed hesitantly.

"Well," Bonnie quietly answered, a grim smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, "actually we were hoping that _you_ would do that."

Bonnie wasn't sure how she managed it, but Jessica's eyes widened even more than they had been.

"Me? I can't!" she immediately protested, stricken. "I…I can't imagine how it would be possible, for one thing. And for another, I… It's…it's _completely_ unethical. Who is this person?" she asked, gesturing at the man – the boy, really – in the bed. "Did his family agree to this? Did…?"

Bonnie swallowed as Jessica's voice trailed off.

"No one knows who he is," she said softly. "He was found unconscious five months ago by an early-morning jogger in a park in San Diego and then a few days later he was brought to UCLA Hospital. He had no ID on him and although a great deal of effort went into publicizing the situation, no one came forward to identify him. It wasn't foul play, though. He apparently had a large number of congenital aneurysms in his brain that ruptured in some kind of cascade."

Jessica swallowed.

"I…think I remember hearing something about that, yes. I have some friends who are associated with UCLA… I never heard how it all resolved, though."

"In short, it didn't," Bonnie answered. "No one came forward in almost five months, and it turned out that he couldn't be identified even through dental records. Since his condition did not change, and his attending physician offered no hope of recovery, and his upkeep was very expensive… The decision was made the other day to let him go. So you see, if this hadn't happened with Kitt and Devon hadn't…intervened… At least this way, he can be useful. Or at least, his body can be…"

Dazed, Jessica practically stumbled over to the couch under the windows, settling herself on it numbly. She stared at the rich, dark green carpet beneath her feet for a long time before finally raising her gaze to meet Bonnie's again and murmuring, "How?"

Bonnie moved to sit herself on the couch next to Jessica.

"It's my job," she said quietly as she settled, "to design hardware and software that can both support Kitt and…operate that body."

Jessica stared at her, wide-eyed again.

"Y'all can do that?" she asked, amazed.

Bonnie's eyes shadowed for a moment, and she swallowed visibly.

"To be honest," she answered, "I don't know for sure. I hope so. I _think_ I can. That is, I think _we_ can. My team, about two dozen of us. It's _way_ too big a job for one person. We've already been working on it around the clock for several days now, ever since we decided to try this. We've made good progress, but we could certainly use your input, if you decide to…" She shrugged as her voice trailed off, and then she added, "Anyway, I _do_ know for certain that I won't be able to…install the finished product."

Jessica blinked.

"And _that__'__s_ what y'all need a neurosurgeon for," she whispered, feeling a deep and strange satisfaction at finally being able to place that piece of the puzzle that the day had become.

"Yes," Bonnie answered, just as quietly. "The Foundation contracts with a number of doctors and nurses, an anesthesiologist, and two surgeons, but neither of the surgeons is a neurosurgeon, so neither even remotely has the expertise required for this task. So, Kitt did some research for neurosurgeons in the area who might be able to pull off something like this. Michael separately approached and tried to convince two others before you. They both told him that it was insane, that it could never be done, and then unsurprisingly, they both ended up very politely refusing the job."

Jessica nodded. She could certainly understand why the other two candidates had refused.

"It _is_ insane," she said quietly, more to herself than to Bonnie. "And then there are numerous ethical considerations that…" She shook her head, overwhelmed, and then turned her head, her gaze suddenly boring into Bonnie's. She asked, point-blank, "What happens if I refuse?"

Bonnie blanched and then took a deep, shuddering breath.

"Then Kitt will die," she said, obviously trying for calm firmness, but her voice trembled slightly. "More specifically, he'll kill himself. He'll destroy his own core programming before he'll let anyone have a copy of it, and it's only a matter of time before whoever's doing this to him gets to him at that level. In fact…it might already be too late even now because my team and I need time, and I have…I have no idea how much time Kitt has left…" And then she could no longer hold back the tears that she'd been fighting off and on during the time that she and Jessica had been talking. "I'm sorry," she murmured around a sob, bowing her head.

Empathetically, Jessica leaned in and laid a hand over one of Bonnie's, giving it an encouraging squeeze.

"It's all right," she said softly. "I understand. And…I want to meet him," she added gently. "Then y'all can stop babysitting me and get back to work, and I'll…have more data to base a decision on."

Bonnie nodded, sniffling and scrubbing tears from her eyes with the heels of her hands.

"Of course," she said, composing herself, thankful for the distraction. "Of course. I'll take you to him right away."

Bonnie stood then, heading for the door, and Jessica followed suit.

"He's been looking forward to meeting you, you know," Bonnie informed her as they went. "He very much admires your work, and he was hoping that you would be the one who would…help him. In fact, he was pissed off at Michael for not talking to you first…"

Jessica smiled as she listened to Bonnie continue. She couldn't help but notice the maternal pride that deeply colored the other woman's voice. She also couldn't help but marvel, half in wonder and half in absolute horror, at what she was thinking about getting herself into. But she also couldn't help but be intrigued by the alluring challenge of attempting to do what these people wanted her to do. She couldn't help being intrigued, also, by all that Bonnie had told her. She had thought, when Michael had told her a little about Kitt, that he had to be exaggerating. But if he had been, then so was Bonnie. In fact, Bonnie would have to be exaggerating even more…

Bemused by the notion of an AI who hoped and admired, who looked forward to things, who could be pissed off and scared to death, and who was apparently capable of self-sacrifice, much less of understanding the need for it, Jessica silently followed Bonnie back downstairs, absorbing everything that she said as they went.


	4. Chapter 4

Aside from fixing cars, if there was one thing that Angelo Gianelli knew how to do, it was how to distract and occasionally entertain Kitt, the AI who lived inside his favorite car, ever. He'd been doing a lot of distracting and entertaining for the past few days, especially since Michael had been mostly absent, off on a quest to snare another brain to add to the collection working on the problem of Kitt's little situation. And since Angelo's services as a so-called grease monkey weren't required for the moment but he felt like he should be doing _something_, he was doing the only "something" that he was capable of doing under the circumstances.

It seemed particularly important to do so just now, given the frightening ordeal that Kitt had just endured, one that had been frightening not just to Kitt himself but also to everyone associated with him. In its wake, Kitt didn't particularly want to be alone, and Angelo figured that it wouldn't be the best idea for him to be allowed to dwell on what had happened, either. Bonnie had had to leave to go to talk to Michael once he got back…so that left, for the moment, only Angelo to take up the slack.

But he was more than up to the task. As he leaned back comfortably against the Trans Am's windshield and absently shoved stray strands of his mop of straight, shoulder-length brown hair out of his face, Angelo said, "So here's the burning, million-dollar question, Kitt: Once the Great Brain Trust moves you into the new digs, so to speak, and you're all settled in and comfy an' everything… Do I get to sleep with you?"

Kitt was quiet for a long moment, long enough that Angelo started to become concerned. He was about to say something, something deeply worried, when Kitt made a scoffing noise and finally answered, unruffled by the question, "I would think that Peter would have something to say about that."

"Naaaah!" Angelo asserted. "Well, not if he could join in the fun, that is," he qualified.

"Hah!" Kitt responded scathingly and then high-handedly added, "As if the two of you together could handle me."

Angelo chuckled, patting and then sensuously stroking the gleaming black hood of the car beneath him.

"Babe," he said, "it'd be my pleasure to _handle_ you." As Kitt made an exasperated noise at that, he added, "Besides, I've spent _years_ underneath you, lubing your chassis and poking at some of your more sensitive bits. S'about time you started returning the favor, don'tcha think?"

Kitt heaved a resigned mental sigh. He'd gotten used to Angelo's overtly flirtatious nature, mostly because he'd had no choice but to do so. The fact that Kitt was housed in a car hadn't in the slightest deterred Angelo from flirting mercilessly with him, at least not once he knew that Kitt took no offense. Angelo claimed that Kitt's voice was a serious turn-on – He'd said, ruefully, that he seemed to have a thing for guys with snotty accents – not to mention the fact that the car was, as Angelo put it, dead sexy. And although Kitt hadn't understood the phenomenon at all to begin with, once Angelo had felt comfortable and familiar enough with him to let his flirtatious nature show it all, he'd slowly come to comprehend it. Eventually, Kitt had even grown to appreciate it in a strange sort of way, finding that he enjoyed the back-and-forth between them as Angelo flirted and he invariably smacked him down. Kitt was generally good at bantering. He had to be, in order to keep up with Michael, but this was a different sort of bantering. And if nothing else, it passed the time during the long hours that Angelo spent diagnosing and working on the car's more conventional systems, especially those that were always taking a severe beating, things like the brakes and the suspension. Often, he had to rebuild entire systems, and more than a few times, he and Peter had had to rebuild more or less the entire car, outside of its more unconventional components.

But that was their job, and they did it extremely well, to the point that Kitt was reluctant to allow anyone other than them and Bonnie to touch him. Bonnie might be responsible for him, the AI, and for dreaming up and installing new and innovative gadgets and gizmos for him to use, but it was Peter and Angelo who, on an almost daily basis, maintained the car itself, keeping it looking as good as it did and operating as perfectly as it did. They took great pride in their work, and it showed. Kitt, who had no problem admitting that he had a vain streak several miles wide, was deeply thankful for it. So was Michael, although he'd only grudgingly admit to it.

Now, much to his relief, Kitt was saved from having to answer Angelo's proposition by the arrival of Peter, who used one hip to push open the door to the garage bay, his hands being already occupied with holding two large insulated cups. One was filled with strong black coffee for Angelo, the other with brewing tea for himself.

Peter Stansfield was tall – not quite as tall as Michael was, since that was a claim that few could make, but taller than average – and lanky, with a thick thatch of short, curly, bright red-orange hair and the very fair and densely freckled skin that typically accompanied that sort of hair. He was the physical antithesis of Angelo, who was shorter, stocky, dark-haired, and olive-skinned.

Of course, that wasn't the only way that they were opposite. Peter was British, of aristocratic descent. He was Yale-educated, with a graduate business degree that he had no interest whatsoever in using, much to his family's disgust. He'd found himself in Los Angeles when he'd rather disastrously married an LA-native woman he'd met while at Yale. Having secured his green card, he'd decided to stay in the States after the divorce, having no wish to return to England and his disappointed and disapproving family. Angelo, on the other hand, hailed from Brooklyn, and fifteen years of living clear across the country in LA, escaping his own deeply Catholic family who deeply disapproved of his sexual orientation, had not at all dulled the verbal evidence of that heritage. His family was decidedly working-class, and many of them were hard-working, grease-grubbing mechanics, whereas Peter's affection for cars and his passion for restoring and working on them had always been seen by his family as an odd but quaint little hobby that he had. Neither Peter nor Angelo had an entirely clear understanding of how they'd managed to end up with each other, but their relationship was a happy, harmonious one that was entering its twelfth year.

Now, Peter approached Kitt and nonchalantly hitched himself up onto his hood next to Angelo. He handed Angelo his cup of coffee with an affectionate and cheerful, "Here you are, darling," which Angelo answered with a, "Oh, thank you ever so much, love," that playfully swiped Peter's accent and inflections.

A moment later, after he'd swallowed about half of his scalding-hot coffee in just a couple of slurps, Angelo informed Peter, "So Kitt and I were just discussing a threesome once he's all moved and stuff."

"Oh, really?" Peter answered mildly. Almost twelve years with Angelo, ten years of it living with him, meant that very little had the power to surprise him, much less to shock him, anymore.

"I would hardly call it a discussion," Kitt put in before Angelo could say anything, and the tone of his voice was decidedly long-suffering. "It was more of an indecent proposal."

"Indecent?" Peter echoed with feigned scandalized surprise in his voice. "Angelo?"

"Shocking, isn't it?" Kitt answered in the same tone.

Peter grinned at that and then sipped delicately at his tea, testing its strength. Deciding that it was strong enough, he removed the teabag and tossed it with deadly accuracy into a wastebasket across the room, a legacy from his days spent playing basketball at Yale. He turned his attention back to Angelo.

"So, who was to be the third in this sordid little affair you were planning?" he asked casually. "Michael?"

Angelo nearly choked on his coffee, and Peter could have sworn that he heard something like a snicker emanate from Kitt, although whether the sound was prompted by Peter's suggestion or by Angelo's reaction to it was anyone's guess.

"No! _You_, you doofus," Angelo managed to sputter once he could breathe again. Then he thought about things for a moment, narrowing his eyes as he speculatively added, "Although now that you mention it…"

Peter rolled his eyes.

"You are impossible," he muttered as he quaffed his tea.

Angelo gave him a toothy, impish grin, and replied, "Hey, it was your idea." He reached back to gently rap the knuckles of one hand against Kitt's windshield, as if to get his attention, and asked, "Whaddaya think, Kitt?"

"I think you'd have a hard sell on—" Kitt started to answer before going abruptly and completely silent.

"Kitt?" Angelo asked with a concerned frown. He twisted around to look through the windshield, as if doing so would tell him anything. "Kitt, you OK?"

When Kitt continued to be ominously silent, Peter scowled, muttered a worried "Damn!", and then slid off the car's hood. He went around to the driver's side door, opening it and settling himself in the driver's seat. He noted that some of the indicators on the dashboard had gone dark, and he worriedly prompted, "Kitt?"

A long and very worrisome moment later, Kitt murmured, "I'm…still here." But his voice was hesitant and a notch weaker than it had been before.

"Sweet Jesus," Angelo muttered fervently, crossing himself and then slumping until his forehead was resting against the windshield. "Don't _do_ that!" he added.

"I'm sorry," Kitt quietly apologized. "It's just…I _hate_ this," he suddenly, vehemently announced.

"It's all right, Kitt," Peter comforted him, patting the steering wheel consolingly. "We know. And we know it's frightening."

"Yes, it is," Kitt answered softly. "Has anyone heard from Michael?" he asked both anxiously and hopefully after a moment.

Angelo and Peter exchanged a glance through the windshield, and Angelo answered gently, soothingly. "I told you, sweetheart: Bonnie paged him and talked to him, told him what happened. I'm sure he'll be here as soon as he can be."

And with that, Michael burst into the garage bay as if he'd been blown into the room by tornado-force winds.

"See?" Angelo said mildly, smiling, while Peter hastily exited the Trans Am's cabin. He knew that he didn't have to do so, but it just didn't feel right to be there, certainly not on the driver's side, not if Michael was in the same room.

Kitt, meanwhile, uttered a delighted and profoundly relieved, "Michael!"

The AI fired up the Trans Am's engine, and rolled it toward Michael, mindful that he was tethered to a diagnostic mainframe via a number of thick, coiled cables that snaked in through the passenger-side window of the car and then plugged into various ports lurking on the underside of the dashboard. The cables were long enough that he still had some freedom of movement…but only so much. Still, it wasn't the cables that halted his forward momentum.

Instead, as relief over Michael's arrival flooded over him, it temporarily escaped Kitt's attention that Angelo was still sitting on the hood of the car. He was reminded only when Angelo yelped out a surprised, "Whoa!" Kitt broke abruptly in response, but inertia was a difficult force to overcome, and Angelo helplessly slid forward off the smooth, shiny hood of the car. He was saved from injuring possibly more than his pride only by Michael reflexively lunging forward, reaching out, and grabbing him.

"I'm sorry!" Kitt immediately apologized, horrified.

"Think _nothing_ of it, babe," Angelo happily answered Kitt as he smiled and blinked disarmingly up at Michael, who had a hand wrapped firmly around his bicep, steadying him, and who was close enough that Angelo could feel his body heat.

Michael rolled his eyes and set Angelo aside.

"Now what was that you were saying about a hard sell, Kitt?" Angelo asked innocently while aiming a teasing grin at Michael.

"Never mind!" Kitt answered firmly while Michael gave Angelo a suspicious, narrow-eyed glare.

"Aw, don't worry, Michael," Angelo lightly answered Michael's look. "We were just keeping him warm for you. Distracted, you know?"

"Mmmm," Michael grumbled. "It's just that, with you, 'distracted' tends to mean 'sexually harassed.'"

"Nah," Angelo answered with a wicked grin. "That comes later, after they move him."

And then he and Peter scooted before Michael could find something to throw at Angelo. Michael watched them leave, shaking his head, half amused and half disturbed, which tended to be his usual state whenever the grease monkeys, Angelo especially, were in the vicinity. And then he turned back to Kitt.

"Are you all right?" Michael asked Kitt as he approached the car and dropped into the driver's seat.

"He's harmless, Michael," Kitt answered as Michael settled himself.

Michael couldn't help but notice that Kitt's voice was much weaker than it had been the last time they had spoken. He might have thought that Kitt sounded exhausted, but he knew that Kitt didn't tire like a human being, that he couldn't become physically exhausted. It was more like his resources were being spread ever thinner now, and the increasing thinness was, in turn, reflected in his voice.

"Not him!" Michael exclaimed. "I meant…Are you _all__ right_?"

"No, I'm not," Kitt answered honestly. "Not nearly so. But for now, I'm…maintaining. And I'm glad you're back."

Michael smiled as he answered, "Me, too, pal. And you might be happy to know that I brought a friend home from school with me today."

"Dr. Macintyre?" Kitt asked, perking up a little. "She agreed to—"

"She agreed to come here with me, yes," Michael quietly interrupted. "But she doesn't know everything yet. She hardly knows anything, actually. I was just starting to talk about more of the details of the situation when Bonnie paged me. I called her back and she told me that you were…and I didn't think I'd be able to make it back before you…" Unable to continue, his voice trailed off.

"I'm sorry that I upset you," Kitt said quietly.

Michael patted the dash soothingly as he answered, "_You_ didn't upset me, pal. This _thing_ upsets me. I'm just glad that you're…"

"Still here?" Kitt supplied with a touch of wry, gallows amusement in his voice.

Michael smiled in the same vein.

"Yeah, that," he answered quietly. "Anyway," he continued after a moment, "Bonnie's talking to Dr. Macintyre now, filling her in. It's probably better that she does it, anyway. You know, one freakishly enormous brain to another."

Kitt made a quiet, amused noise.

"You're probably right," he agreed. "After all, explaining the situation might require words that have more than three syllables," he teased after a pause.

"Hey, come on," Michael protested. "You know how much my vocabulary has improved since I've been stuck with you."

"Yes, I know precisely how _little_ it's improved," Kitt answered ruefully. When Michael remained silent, he added, "Are _you_ all right, Michael?"

Michael sighed and then answered, "Yeah, Kitt, I'm OK. Worried about you, but…OK. It's just…"

"Just?" Kitt prompted.

"It's just that every time something happens to you," Michael complained, "I wish I could _do_ something."

"You _did_ do something," Kitt answered softly. "You persuaded Dr. Macintyre to come here, and then you brought her here."

"Which doesn't necessarily mean that she'll agree to help," Michael glumly pointed out.

"No, it doesn't," Kitt quietly agreed. "But it was farther than you got with the other two…"

"Ah, here comes the 'I told you so' part," Michael said with a resigned sigh.

"No," Kitt answered. "Not this time. Although I confess that it's very frustrating when you refuse to listen to me, I _do_ understand your reasoning for approaching the others first. I just hope that Dr. Macintyre…"

"Yeah, pal, I know," Michael said as Kitt's voice trailed off, obviously troubled. "I hope so, too. But…now what? I feel so…useless."

"Join the club," Kitt said ruefully.

Michael had to laugh at that.

"Yeah, it's kind of ironic, huh?" he said. "Usually, it's you and me against the world, out there with our asses on the line…doing stuff. Now…"

"Now all we can do is sit here on our asses and wait while other people do stuff," Kitt finished resignedly. He paused as Michael snorted at that, and then he said, "That being the case…Care for some blackjack?"

Michael laughed out loud.

"You are _warped_," he decided.

"Well, I did learn from the best, you know," Kitt replied.

"Who?" Michael asked innocently. "Angelo?"

"Him, too," Kitt serenely answered.

Michael snorted at that, too. And then he said, "Sure. Blackjack. Bring it on. But I'm telling you, when all this is over, I'm signing you up for Gambler's Anonymous."

"Just shut up and play, Michael," Kitt advised.

They chatted about things both relevant and irrelevant while they played. Michael found himself owing Kitt almost two hundred dollars by the time he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, the door to the garage bay opening.

"Mind your manners, pal," Michael said to Kitt, as he looked up and watched Jessica and Bonnie step into the bay. "You've got a visitor."

* * *

><p><em>Well, now that all the character introductions are done, we can move on to, you know, the story. *laughs*<em>

_**Review replies!**_

_**Jalaperilo:** Oh, come on! You should know by now that I only pick on those I love. (I kill off those whom I hate. ;) ) In fact, you can generally tell how much I love a character by the amount of hurt-but-not-death I heap on them in fanfic. *laughs* If I don't pick on or kill a character, then I must be indifferent to them. And, of course, I adore Kitt, and I've always liked Mama Bonnie. And I'm finding as I'm re-watching the series this time that Michael is actually growing on me. Strange. I was always kind of "meh" about him, maybe because back in the day my age cohort thought he was hot and they were all drooly over him, so I had to be different. I drooled all over the car, instead. ;) But I'm still indifferent to Devon, I'm afraid._

_And I'll have you know that because of you, I pawed through the collection of Chicago CDs (I really need to get around to ripping them one of these days) and listened to "If You Leave Me Now"…and bawled. Damn you, woman! ;)_

_**BlueBassist:** Goodness, I'm not at all proprietary. *laughs* It's fanfic, for heaven's sake. Write your story, share it. I find it hard to believe that this is remotely an original idea; I'm sure something like this idea of mine has been written many times before, just as I'm sure your take on it will differ in many ways. And personally, I'd like to see your take, because I like to see how different people play with the same sort of idea. If anyone complains, just send 'em here. :)_

_**Everyone**** else:** Thanks so much for the comments, and I hope that you'll continue to read/enjoy the story…and continue to offer Kitt hugs. Because God knows, he'll need 'em. MWAHAHAHAH! ;)_


	5. Chapter 5

Jessica stared at the sleek black vehicle in front of her. It was a Trans Am, obviously, but with numerous custom alterations that Phillip, a lifelong car nut, would certainly be able to meticulously list, but that she was only interested in appreciating. The car gleamed in the subdued lighting of the garage bay, the reflected light only emphasizing its clean, unfussy, but strikingly beautiful lines. Unlike Phillip's computer obsession, some of his car-nuttiness had managed to rub off on her over the years, to the point that she enjoyed car shows as much as he did now. She wasn't into the technical aspects of cars, really; she was more into their aesthetics. And she couldn't help but stare, open-mouthed, at the stunning beauty in front of her.

And she couldn't help but stare even more when she realized what she was _really_ looking at.

"He's…housed in the car?" Jessica asked faintly, overwhelmed for about the eighth time in far fewer than eight hours.

"Of course," Bonnie answered with a casual shrug, but then she noticed to look on Jessica's face and added, "You didn't know that?"

"Well…" Jessica answered dazedly. "No."

Bonnie shot a what-is-_wrong_-with-you look at Michael as he emerged from the Trans Am's cabin. He only shrugged and then answered as he approached the two women, "I _thought_ I mentioned it."

Jessica looked up at him as he stood himself next to her, shook her head, and said, "You didn't."

"Oh. Well, then…" Michael responded. "Hey, by the way, Jessica, he's housed in a car."

Jessica rolled her eyes and murmured to Bonnie, "Well, at least now I understand what you meant when you said that he's used to be being mobile." She took a few steps closer to the Trans Am then, frowning at the slowly sweeping and slightly hypnotic front scanner, eyeing it warily.

"Mobile, yes," Bonnie answered with a nod as Jessica stared at Kitt. "He's not only housed in the car, but it's essentially his body. He has complete control over it."

Jessica frowned more deeply at that, and then realized one implication of what Bonnie had said.

"You mean…?" she asked hesitantly, looking over her shoulder at Bonnie. "Are you telling me that he can drive the car?"

"Better than Michael can," Kitt suddenly announced.

All at the same time, Jessica yelped involuntarily, whipped her head around so quickly that a tendon in her neck twinged at her in a brightly painful way, and staggered two or three steps backwards, ending up gaping stupidly at the gleaming black Trans Am in front of her. She was not only surprised that it had spoken to her, but she was even more surprised at _how_ it…he…had spoken. The voice was warm, a mellow, soft-spoken tenor, and it certainly did not sound like a machine, definitely not like the few voice-activated databases with which Jessica had cause to interact on occasion. The voice sounded as human as her own voice sounded, and it was even tinged with an inflection that she couldn't quite place…

"I apologize," Kitt was saying to her meanwhile, noticing the shocked expression on Jessica's face as she stared at him. "I didn't mean to startle you."

_Boston_, Jessica thought, still dumbfounded, gingerly massaging the offended tendon in her neck. _That__'__s __what__ it __is__._ The word "startle" had given it away. But before she could formulate an answer to what Kitt had said, Michael snorted, approached the car, and then casually hitched one thigh up onto its passenger-side front fender, leaning all of his weight on it.

"Liar," he said to the car with a smirk. To Jessica, he explained, "He loves shocking the hell out of people whenever he thinks he can get away with it. Don't let the whole naïve, polite, and innocent routine fool you, because nowadays it's just a big sham." He turned his attention back to the car and added, repeatedly poking at the hood with one finger for emphasis, "And you do _not_ drive this car better than I do, pal."

"That's a mere matter of opinion, Michael," Kitt answered with a noticeable degree of sudden haughtiness that Jessica found amazing. "Mine simply does not happen to coincide with yours," Kitt snippily continued. "My opinion is also that you are quite rude. Were you raised in a barn? Weren't you ever taught that you're _supposed_ to introduce people who don't know each other?"

"Oh!" Michael responded with a grin. "Right! Of course. Dr. Jessica Macintyre, this is Kitt," he said, gesturing grandiosely at the entirety of the glossy black car that he was more or less sitting on. "Kitt, Dr. Jessica Macintyre. Happy now?" he muttered at Kitt, much more quietly.

"Yes, Michael, thank you," Kitt answered complacently. "And I must say that it's a true pleasure to meet you, Doctor," he added warmly, sincerely. Even admiringly. "Although I confess that Michael is right about one thing: I do rather enjoy shocking people. Still, I must apologize again for startling you."

It took another moment for Jessica to find her voice, and even when she did find it, it was decidedly shaky.

"That's…that's all right," she finally managed to say. "I guess I just didn't expect that…that…"

"Most people don't," Kitt answered ruefully as Jessica's voice trailed off. And then he lightly added, "But then again, that's the very thing that makes shocking them fun. Somehow, it never seems to get old."

Jessica shook her head at that, wincing when the tendon in her neck twinged again in response. She still didn't quite believe what she was hearing. Humor, haughtiness, ruefulness, warmth, admiration, lightness. Ribbing Michael. Admitting to enjoyment, to the capacity for fun. And that was just in the space of a couple of minutes. It was all strong evidence that she was interacting with a genuine thinking, self-aware personality, a true intelligence, rather than merely a complex set of programmed responses. She realized then that neither Michael nor Bonnie had been exaggerating in the slightest about Kitt. In fact, there was a strong possibility that they'd been understating.

_Phillip__ would__ barter__ his__ very __soul__ to__ see__ this_, she thought wonderingly just before she murmured, aloud and unthinkingly, "Y'all're amazing."

"Thank you," Kitt answered happily, taking the compliment in stride, as usual not bothering with false modesty. "But if I may say so, Doctor, so are you." When Jessica just blinked at him, he added, "I've read much about you and your work. My abilities may be impressive, but I do believe that yours are _truly_ amazing. I, after all, don't have the power to save lives that by all rights ought to be lost."

Jessica swallowed and answered, sincerely, "Well…thank you, Kitt. I can't say that I've _read_ a lot about you," she continued, "but I've certainly _heard_ a lot."

"All good things, pal," Michael assured Kitt before Kitt could say anything. He patted the hood of the car affectionately, but then he qualified, "Well, _mostly_ good things. I may have let it slip that you're a complete pain in the ass."

Kitt immediately shot back, his tone long-suffering, "There you go, confusing me with you again, Michael. How many times do I have to tell you that you need to see a professional about that projecting problem that you have? Perhaps Dr. Macintyre would be kind enough to refer you to a competent psychiatrist."

"Hah, hah. Very funny," Michael retorted. "Besides, what do you know, anyway? _You_ don't have an ass."

"And you call _me_ literal," Kitt grumbled.

"Boys!" Bonnie suddenly interrupted when Michael opened his mouth to fire off another retort at Kitt; Jessica had almost forgotten that she was there, as caught up as she'd become in listening to the interaction between Michael and Kitt, scientifically fascinated at the rapid-fire back-and-forth between them. Bonnie rolled her eyes in exasperation as she added, "Play nicely, for heaven's sake. We have company."

Jessica turned toward Bonnie, all wide-eyed all anew.

"Are they _always_ like this?" she asked Bonnie.

"Not at all," Kitt smoothly answered before Bonnie could. "We're usually _much_ worse. I'm just not one hundred percent, at the moment."

"Yeah," Michael put in with an exaggeratedly regretful sigh. "Gotta go easy on the poor kid, what with his pathetic invalid state and all."

"Invalid!" Kitt indignantly huffed. "I can still outrun you."

"God, I hope so," Michael fervently shot back, "or else you're _way_ worse off than we all think."

They continued to snipe playfully at each other while Jessica blinked, dumbfounded, at Bonnie. Bonnie, amused, merely shrugged and smiled back at Jessica, eventually reaching out to pat her arm consolingly.

"Don't worry," she said. "You get used to it."

Somehow, that only made Jessica more dumbfounded, and Bonnie just smiled at her again.

"I'm sorry, but I need to get back to the lab," she said. "Will you be all right with these two yo-yos?" she added, raising her voice slightly in the hope that the yo-yos in question would hear her and take notice.

Jessica smiled gamely and answered, "Sure." Offhandedly, she added, "I'll see you later."

Bonnie nodded and quietly answered, "I hope so," before turning and leaving, headed for the AI lab.

Interrupting their teasing verbal war in mid-sally, Michael and Kitt respectively called out, "See ya, Bon!" and "Goodbye, Bonnie," as Bonnie left. Bonnie gave them a backwards wave as she exited, and then Michael looked expectantly at Jessica. She had the sudden, distinct, and rather eerie feeling that Kitt was looking at her, too.

"Would you care to sit down, Doctor?" Kitt suddenly asked of Jessica, obligingly opening the driver's side door of the car. "I imagine that it would be more comfortable than standing on concrete.

Jessica shot a look at Michael, who shrugged and made a "Be my guest" gesture at the cabin of the Trans Am.

"By all means," he said with exaggerated graciousness. "Sit. Relax. Chat amongst yourselves. Just be warned that once Kitt starts talking, he won't ever shut up."

Kitt made an irritated "hmph" sound while Jessica smiled, both at what Michael had said and at Kitt's reaction to it.

"I'm gonna go find me a gallon or two of coffee," Michael continued, meanwhile. "You want some?"

Jessica shook her head and replied, "Thank you, but I never touch the stuff."

Michael blinked at her blankly and muttered, "Sacrilege."

"Hey, I'm not averse to caffeine," Jessica answered him with a grin. "I just never acquired a taste for The Almighty Bean, is all, so I have to get my caffeine elsewhere. Like shooting it right into a vein, for instance."

Michael chuckled at that as he gave Kitt's hood a fond pat and then pushed himself off of his fender, heading for the door, while Jessica cautiously approached the car. Kitt couldn't help but notice the tentative look on her face, the nervousness that her body language was shouting.

"Don't worry," he assured her. "I don't bite. After all, I don't have a mouth."

Jessica chuckled at that, finished her approach much more confidently, and then settled herself into the driver's seat. Unsurprisingly, she had plenty of room to move around, since the seat was pushed all the way back to accommodate Michael's freakish height. She ended up kicking off her sandals and sitting cross-legged, and as she delicately tucked in her feet, Kitt shut the door. Once settled, Jessica stared in amazement at the dashboard in front of her.

"Michael once called it 'Darth Vader's bathroom,'" Kitt said, noticing the look on her face.

Jessica smiled, her attention drawn to the flashing gizmo mounted behind the gull-wing steering wheel. The gizmo flashed in time with the words that Kitt had spoken. So, she directed her words at the gizmo as she answered, "I can see why. But I was going to call it 'Mission Control.'"

"That works, too," Kitt said complacently.

Jessica smiled again and then noticed that some of the stuff on the dashboard was dark even though it didn't seem like it should be. She pointed exactly that out to Kitt.

"I've lost those functions," Kitt answered softly. "Those parts of me are gone now."

"Oh," Jessica answered, swallowing a sudden lump in her throat.

She recalled what Bonnie had said about Kitt being eaten alive, and it was obvious to her now that that hadn't been an exaggeration, either. Even as she watched, something else on the dashboard went dark, and she swallowed again. She doubted that the process was physically painful for Kitt, as being eaten alive would be for an animal or a person…but she imagined that it was every bit as frightening for the thinking, sapient individual that Kitt rather obviously was, regardless of his hardware. She found that she had no idea what to say to him.

"So I imagine," Kitt announced suddenly, quietly, saving Jessica from having to think of something to say, "that you're faced with a difficult dilemma."

Jessica frowned as she answered, "How so?"  
>"In order to do what we want you to do," Kitt explained, "a procedure which will theoretically save me, you'll be forced to irrevocably destroy the life of a human being."<p>

Jessica blinked, amazed that Kitt understood exactly what had been cycling through her mind. She could only gape.

"Don't look so surprised," Kitt said softly, his voice tinged with gentle amusement in reaction to the expression on her face. "As I understand it, you as a physician took an oath to 'Do no harm.' In a sense, so have I. I'm afraid that I understand the dilemma that you're facing all too well because I face a similar one quite often."

Jessica blinked again, this time murmuring, "You do?"

"Yes," Kitt answered. "You see, there are two main, overriding, and equally strong directives that I obey. The first is to protect human life in general. The second is to protect Michael, specifically. I will fulfill either or both of those directives at the cost of my own existence, if necessary. Unfortunately, in the situations in which Michael and I often find ourselves, those two directives are rather often put into direct conflict with each other. Far too often, in order to protect Michael, I have to allow others to be or to remain endangered. To my knowledge, I have never directly killed anyone…but I _have_ allowed people to be injured, sometimes to die, in order to remove Michael from equally imminent and equally mortal danger, choosing him over another person. It's a terrible decision to have to make, and I'm often forced to make it in a split-second. Early on, it caused me much…difficulty when I thought about such situations after the fact. Sometimes, it still does. Sometimes, things that happened years ago will come back and haunt me all over again."

"Remorse," Jessica murmured, shaking her head in amazement.

"Yes," Kitt quietly answered. "You might say that it's a constant companion of mine, particularly because, barring catastrophic damage, I don't have the ability to forget. So as I said, I completely understand the dilemma that you're facing, Dr. Macintyre."

"Please, call me Jessica," Jessica said.

"But not Jessie," Kitt quipped.

"Lord, are y'all psychic, too?" Jessica asked, surprised.

"Would you believe me if I said that I was?" Kitt asked back.

"No," Jessica answered honestly.

"Damn," Kitt muttered. Jessica laughed at that as Kitt explained, "Michael told me. He warned me that you would sic your enormous, slobbering dog on me if I called you Jessie. Dogs and I have something of a checkered past, so believe me when I say that I will not make that mistake."

Jessica chuckled.

"In any case," Kitt said, returning to the subject at hand, "to a certain extent I share your dilemma. You're—"

And then he went abruptly silent. Jessica frowned and reflexively looked around herself as if doing so would somehow explain what had happened. As she turned back to the dashboard, she watched a few of the indicators on the dashboard flash erratically. Her frown deepened as she tentatively asked, "Kitt?" and was met only with more silence.

About thirty seconds passed before the indicators that had been flashing steadied again, and Kitt said, frustration very evident in his voice, "My apologies, Jessica."

"Are y'all…all right?" Jessica warily asked.

"No," Kitt answered honestly. As he noticed Jessica's frown somehow managing to deepen even further, her expression clearly becoming alarmed, he clarified, "That is, I'm not in imminent danger, but…"

"But you're not one-hundred percent, either," Jessica supplied as Kitt's voice trailed off.

"Unfortunately, no," Kitt answered. "Sometimes this conditiontakes all of my concentration to deflect, and it happens suddenly, without warning. I apologize in advance if it happens again."

Jessica nodded, smiling, and answered softly, "There's no need to apologize, Kitt. I understand." She paused for a moment, and then she prompted, "So y'all were saying…?"

"I was saying," Kitt said, "that I understand your position. You're being asked to sacrifice a human life for the sake of a machine, for me. The very idea flies in the face of the oath that you took. And oddly enough, it goes _entirely_ against my own programming as well. And I have to say that that makes me…uncomfortable."

Jessica frowned thoughtfully at that and then shifted her position, drawing her knees into her chest. She folded her forearms on top of her knees and then rested her chin on top of her forearms as she sighed and answered, "I suppose I can understand that, in a way. But… Well, to be honest, the human life in question isn't much of a life at all, and I've never known a machine to experience remorse, Kitt, much less everything else that you've shown. Y'all might have programming and all, but obviously y'all're much more than a machine."

"Perhaps," Kitt conceded quietly. "The inescapable fact remains, however, that the core of my being, if you will, is a computer. It…_I_ can be rebuilt. Recreated. The same can't be said of the person lying in that bed in the house."

"That's not true," Jessica answered, shaking her head and frowning thoughtfully. "At least not from what Bonnie told me. Your…infrastructure, your hardware, could be rebuilt and the software could be reinstalled and all that computer-y stuff, sure. But from what Bonnie said, the result of doing all that wouldn't be _you_. It'd be…some other guy. Like a clone, identical in all physical respects but not even _close_ to the same person, not without having had the same…upbringing." She shrugged and added, "So it seems to me that y'all're a life like any other, Kitt, just as unique and irreplaceable as any other. And I confess that that surprises the hell out of me because I came down here expecting to find a computer with some fancy interactive…whatchamacallits."

"Whatchamacallits?" Kitt echoed, amused. "Please stop trying to confuse me with such technical terms, Jessica."

"Hey, I'm not a computer person, all right?" Jessica protested with a smirk. "I hate the damned things, in fact," she muttered.

"There's some irony," Kitt remarked, still amused.

Jessica chuckled and answered, "Yes, I suppose so. But y'see, that's kinda my point right there. I came to this estate and then I came down here, specifically, thinking that Michael and Bonnie were completely bonkers. I came down here expecting to find a computer. A thing. Maybe a really fancy-schmancy thing, a very impressive thing, but still a thing. Not a…person. But it's clear to me that y'all are, at least in all the ways that really matter, a person, not a fancy computer. Or at least, you're not _just_ a fancy computer."

Kitt was quiet for a moment. And then he said, very softly, "And that makes the decision that you're facing harder for you, not easier."

Jessica blinked, surprised yet again, but less so this time; Kitt making intuitive leaps that she wouldn't have imagined were impossible for something, some_one_, who wasn't human was already becoming routine. She had always been quick to adapt that way.

"Yes, it does," she answered Kitt. "A computer weighed against a human life, even one who is guaranteed never to regain consciousness? That's a no-brainer. No offense, but the human wins, hands-down."

"Of course," Kitt answered, without a trace of offense. "After all, that's what my programming dictates, as well. My own continued existence is, at best, a tertiary consideration in the grand scheme of things."

Jessica nodded and sighed. Leaning her head back against the seat's headrest, gazing up through the T-top panel above her, she said, "But like I said, you're _not_ just a computer, Kitt. I've known y'all for, what? Ten, twenty minutes? And I already know that. Your brain might be composed of computer hardware, but that doesn't make y'all less of a life."

"Thank you, Jessica," Kitt murmured, finding himself somewhat amazed. It usually took people a lot longer than it had taken Jessica to accept him as a "person," as a thinking individual, rather than as a thing. It had taken even Michael a while – Weeks, maybe even months, of more or less constant exposure and interaction – to truly accept him as anything more than a thing. It had taken Jessica mere minutes to do so.

Jessica aimed a smile at the voice modulator as she caught the note of amazement in Kitt's voice, and she said, "Don't sound so surprised. I may not be a computer person, but I _am_ both a neurologist and a neurosurgeon. I know the difference between a set of programmed, conditioned responses and reactions, even a very complex set of them, and the responses and the thinking processes of a genuinely sapient brain. And although I don't yet have a huge sample of data from which to draw conclusions, y'all seem to me to have the very same mixture of the two that most of the human beings I've encountered have."

"I…do?" Kitt asked, and the hesitation in his voice spoke of deep and surprised confusion, which made Jessica smile fondly.

"You do," she confirmed with a chuckle. "And now that I think about it, it really isn't all that surprising. Aside from the fact that it's miraculous, of course. But when all is said and done, other than being born with a set of encyclopedias in your proverbial head and with a car for a body, y'all're just like the rest of us on the planet, Kitt."

"I…am?" Kitt responded, still with that deeply perplexed hesitation in his voice.

"Yep," Jessica asserted. "Like the rest of us, y'all were brought into the world with instinctive programming that's constantly being modified by and augmented with the results of experiential learning. And like the rest of us, y'all retain those initial base instincts, but as time goes on it's more often overridden with reasoning and, for lack of a better word, wisdom."

Kitt thought about that for a long while, long enough that Jessica thought that maybe he was experiencing another lapse, but then he answered quietly, "Most people don't see it that way at all."

Jessica snorted and asserted, "Most people aren't neurologists. Nor geniuses, for that matter." Kitt made a noise at that, something that might have been a chuckle, and Jessica finished with a shrug, "Hey, I'm not into false modesty, all right?"

"Nor am I," Kitt answered honestly, and she might have been imagining it, but Jessica could have sworn that she heard a note of warning, perhaps even of challenge, in his voice.

Jessica smiled and said, "Great. We'll play a nice game of Dueling Egos later, then." Then she said, her tone turning much more serious. "Anyway, now it appears that I'm faced with a life weighed against a life. One of them is vital, alive, and in danger. The other, as I said, will never regain consciousness, at least not without a whole heap of miraculous intervention from God Almighty. So, when all is said and done…" she finished with a sigh and a thoughtful frown. "Well, really, it all boils down to another no-brainer."

"Except that it isn't," Kitt put in quietly, simply. "Because of what I am."

"No, Kitt," Jessica answered solemnly, shaking her head slowly as she arrived at a conclusion and then made her decision without another thought, for better or worse. "It _is_a no-brainer because _what_ y'all are is not nearly as important as _who_ y'all are. It's obvious to me that y'all're a life more than that boy will ever be now, and yours is a life that's in real and imminent danger, from what Bonnie told me. So if nothing else, the principles of triage demand that I choose to do my best to save your life, even though doing so means letting another die."

"Perhaps," Kitt put in. "However, there's a difference between simply letting a person die because they have little chance of survival and actively bringing about that person's death."

"Sometimes," Jessica agreed with a nod. "But not so much for patients like our friend over there in the house. I haven't had a chance to look at his scans yet, but judging by the EEG and his vitals, I'm going to guess that his cerebral cortex is toast, but the rest of his brain is still working fairly well. In that sort of case, often there is no way to just let the person die. They'll just linger, theoretically for years, so in order to bring about their physical death, an action is required. Usually, once a decision is made to let them go, the patient's feeding tube is removed, the body starves to death, and that's that. In the case of our friend…if not for your situation, he'd be organ transplant fodder now. In fact, I'm surprised they waited this long. Usually the organ harvesters are chafing at the bit and sharpening their scalpels well before a catastrophically injured person is declared brain dead."

Kitt considered that for a moment, and then he said doubtfully, "So if not for this…plan, then the death of our friend, as you put it, could have helped how many others? Instead, it's helping me. Maybe. Somehow that doesn't make me feel better about this, Jessica."

Jessica shook her head solemnly.

"I wouldn't sell yourself so cheaply if I were you, Kitt," she said, quietly and very seriously. "Your survival may not be much of a priority from your own point of view, but from what I've been told, there could be thousands of people who are alive today who wouldn't be that way had y'all never existed. If this all goes as planned, then that trend will continue for who knows how long. In which case ensuring your survival now will do _far_ greater good, in the long run, than allowing the organ harvesters to descend like vultures and do their nasty thing, thus allowing a few people to live for a few more years."

"Triage again?" Kitt asked.

Jessica shrugged.

"In a way, I suppose it is," she agreed. "And…Well, not to be indelicate, but once all this is all over, either way, the organ vultures can still descend away. In fact, after operating in a diminished capacity for so long, the organs will be in much better shape if they were to get a bit of use before they're…redistributed."

"If you say so," Kitt answered quietly, dubiously.

Jessica frowned for a long moment, and then she asked, "Why do I get the sense that I'm talking you into this, Kitt?" She grimaced and then added, "Frankly, I thought it was going to be the other way around."

Kitt emitted an indeterminate sound, one that seemed to be something between a chuckle, a snort, and a sigh, and then he answered, "As I said, this scheme goes against everything that I am, so to speak. It's difficult for me to simply put all of that aside. In fact, in some ways, it's _impossible_ for me to do so. Bonnie and Michael had me half-convinced of the necessity of doing this, but the arguments that they made were entirely driven by emotion. They're…rather attached to me."

"No! Really?" Jessica answered with a soft laugh.

"I'm afraid so," Kitt replied lightly. More seriously, he added, "Bonnie in particular pointed out to me that my loss would hurt those who are close to me and that by agreeing to this course of action and assuming that it would be successful, I would be sparing them pain from which they might never fully recover. That argument was…getting me by, I suppose, even though I'm very well aware that human beings have the ability to recover from just about any kind of hurt, and that my…family would eventually recover and move on, too. Your arguments, on the other hand, are entirely logic-driven."

"Which makes y'all feel _tons_ better," Jessica lightly teased.

"Well… Yes, it does, actually," Kitt answered honestly.

Jessica chuckled and said, "Glad to be of service."

It was then that Michael arrived back in the garage, a cup of coffee in hand. A kind of sixth sense made him pause just a few steps into the room as he recognized that its mood was much different than it had been when he'd left it. Feeling a strange mixture of hope and dread, he glanced uncertainly at Jessica in the cabin of the Trans Am, raising his eyebrows questioningly at her. In return, she gave him an enigmatic half-smile, opened the car door, and stood up. She folded her arms on top of the door's window, still with the half-smile on her face.

"Break out the good china," she said quietly to Michael. "You've got a houseguest."

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><p><em><strong>Review replies!<strong> A lot of 'em, apparently. Sorry. Just skip to the one that's applicable to you. :)_

_**CharmingCheyenne:** Killing characters is fun, eh? Cathartic, in a way. As for hurting characters…I used to write a TON of slashy hurt/comfort when I was younger. (And for me, that's like 30 years ago. *laughs madly*) That's how I started writing, actually, so hurting is just second nature, I'm afraid. And of course, the reason we hurt the ones we love is so that we can hug them afterwards. ;)_

_**Emperatrizdelanoche**: *laughs* Oh, I think you might have a lot of competition when it comes to sleeping with Kitt, in the sexual sense or otherwise. But since you did ask first, I guess you get the first round. ;) And yes, he is a very sexy car, indeed, and I have no plans to change that. At least, not permanently. :)_

_**BuckleWinner:** Well, I hope that you enjoyed Jessica and Kitt's meeting. :) They will have quite a journey together before this is all over, I'm afraid, so it's a good thing they get along. Although you just **know** the ego thing is going to cause some fireworks, right? *laughs*_

_**Melody****Phoenix:** Worry not! Not for nothing is this story called "Sojourn." ;) There are, of course, specific reasons why I want to do this to him. None of those reasons involve him sleeping with anyone (Even Angelo. ;) ) and/or acquiring an author-insert girlfriend, which so far as I've read seems to be the usual motivation behind this kind of thing, as it often tends to be in similar Transformers fanfics, Transformers being my "real" fandom. But in the end, I do prefer him as a car, indeed._

_**Luna:** Oh, don't let Kitt fool you. He loves to suffer at Angelo's hands and to make Angelo suffer from unrequited lust right back. ;) And no, no one's going to be sleeping with Kitt. Promise. ;) At least, not in the sexual sense. The poor boy's going to have enough to deal with as it is, without dealing with that. MWAHAHAHAHAH! *cough*_

_**Lady****Yuri:** I am evil, yes. And very, very hurtful. And like I said, I love to hurt those I love. But no, the evil has nothing to do with Peter and Angelo. They have a role to play in this story, to be sure…but not **that** role. *laughs*_

_**Jalaperilo:** Browser incompatibility sux. I'll PM ya's. ;)_

_And as a general note: Aw, I'm glad people like Peter and Angelo. I like 'em, too, especially Angelo because in my head he's adorable (and harmless, really). For those of you who are Transformers fans: Think Raoul. Only Italian, not Hispanic. And about 20 years older. And not as much of a dork. *laughs* And not as adorable as Kitt, either, because…Well, it's pretty much impossible to be more adorable than Kitt, unless you're a certain Dinobo_t. ;)


	6. Chapter 6

_So, this chapter finishes up what I think of as Part I of this story…which is the shortest part by far, other than the epilogue. *laughs* It's just a little thing, really, but it accomplishes a few goals:_

_1) It wraps up Jessica's Really Weird Day. (Well, OK, so she's going to have many more really weird days, but this at least wraps up the first one. ;) )  
>2) It gives the good doctor a little more "flesh," a little more background.<br>3) Most importantly, it pretty much defines the overall way that I see the relationship between Michael and Kitt. Y'know, in case y'all were wondering… ;)_

_Oh, and Happy Halloween, everyone! :D I plan to eat a boatload of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, myself…_

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><p>The next twelve hours or so were a whirlwind for Jessica.<p>

Michael had introduced her to Angelo, who was quite the character, to say the least. He'd driven her to her house so that she could pack some clothing and other personal items that she'd need, as well as grab Bogie's stuff while she was at it. Once the ice was broken, she and Angelo had ended up chatting non-stop about everything and nothing along the way. They'd made a stop at a grocery store, and then Angelo had taken her to pick up her car at the diner where she'd left it; she was thankful that it hadn't been towed yet. She'd followed Angelo back to the FLAG mansion, and before he'd left her to what she needed to do for the rest of the day, Angelo had shown her to the small but sumptuously appointed guest cottage that was all hers for the duration of her stay.

After a quick lunch, she'd met and spoken with Devon Miles, who assured her that, whatever she wanted or needed, whether for herself or for Kitt, it would be provided to her. He had spent the morning making pre-arrangements for that sort of thing, so all she had to do was ask. He'd shown her the medical facilities that the Foundation had on the premises, and although she couldn't entirely fathom _why_ they had such extensive facilities at all, aside from the fact that Wilton Knight had been richer than God, she was pleasantly surprised by them. She had quickly determined that she would need relatively little, a number of particular drugs, and several specialized items and pieces of equipment. She'd written down everything that she could think of that she might need, and Devon had assured her that he would take care of it. He'd also, almost offhandedly, assured her that as compensation for her efforts on Kitt's behalf, her outstanding student loan balances would be taken care of, which had completely astounded her. She was still somewhat dazed when she managed to find her way back to the guest cottage, where she'd spent the rest of the afternoon, the evening, and on well into the night on the phone.

She had spoken first with Phillip, to let him know something of what was going on. She couldn't tell him everything, Devon had made that much clear to her, so she had decided that it was easiest to tell him only that she'd been very unexpectedly hired to do some on-site private contract work. It was, after all, the truth. She let him know that she'd be away for quite some time, but that it would be well worth their while, that her student loans would be paid off, news at which Phillip whooped happily, making Jessica, in turn, giggle like a little girl. She had also let him know that she had Bogie and would keep him with her so that he wouldn't have to deal with the dogsitter, a task that Phillip hated because the sitter's place was way out of his way, so that had made him even happier. At least that phone call had been non-stressful and had ended with a smile.

Unlike most of the others she'd made.

Jessica had decided that she'd still do follow-ups with her most recent surgical patients, but beyond that, she'd have to take a temporary leave of absence from her practice. So, she started calling colleagues, enlisting help with her current patients. She'd even swallowed her considerable pride and called the Chief of Neurology at the hospital with which she was associated. He was an insufferable little man who despised her – and the feeling was mutual – because, not only had she proven him wrong on numerous occasions, but she was also much younger than he was, way smarter than he was, and, worst of all, she was female. Still, he had connections that she didn't have, so she had gritted her teeth, spoken to him and, worst of all, asked for his help, for the sake of her patients. So in the end, by 10PM, she'd finally managed to arrange it so that all of her current patients were taken care of for at least the next several weeks.

In between speaking with her colleagues, she'd called her office to let them know what was going on. She'd gotten her office staff working on cancelling upcoming consultations and such and then postponing those already-scheduled procedures that could be postponed, plus arranging for copies of records and files to be transferred to those of her colleagues who'd be taking over her current patients. She'd also gotten her physician's assistant working on meeting with patients whose procedures couldn't be postponed and referring them to those of Jessica's colleagues who'd told her that they had immediate room in their caseloads.

In all, it had been a long, long day, and Jessica found herself tired of talking. She still had some arrangements to make, but they would have to wait until morning. Even though night had long since fallen and the night air was early-spring chilly, she decided to take Bogie for a walk around the estate, and they ended up wandering for a long time as Jessica attempted to clear her mind. It was almost midnight as she and Bogie made their way back to the guest cottage. But, noticing lights on in the garage as they passed it, she decided to take a detour, to say good night to whomever was there.

Unsurprisingly, that was Michael. Jessica stepped into the building and found him in the corridor that ran outside of the garage bays. He was sitting on the floor, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his back up against the wall, his arms folded over his chest, and his head bowed such that his chin was resting on his chest. Jessica thought that he was asleep until he unfolded his arms, grabbed the cup of what was probably coffee sitting on the floor next to him, and took a gulp of it before resting the back of his head against the wall. He sighed deeply, almost forlornly, his gaze aimed up at the dull grey ceiling. Jessica debated whether or not to disturb him, but in the end she quietly, hesitantly called out his name.

Michael blinked and turned his head toward her. He offered her a weak, tired half-smile and said, quietly, "Hey."

"Hey," Jessica echoed as she began to approach him, Bogie's toenails clicking loudly against the concrete floor as he walked alongside her, reminding her that they were overdue for a trim. She ended up sinking down against the opposite wall from Michael, and she sighed deeply as her bottom made contact with the cold floor. She was only just then realizing how tired she was; she hadn't slept in more than forty-eight hours, and she had spent relatively little of that time off her feet. Her profession had conditioned her to be able to go without sleep for longer than most people could, but even she had her limits. Meanwhile, Bogie, the traitor, approached Michael and sniffed at him inquisitively. Michael smiled in response and then reached out to pet the dog and scratch at his ears while he watched Jessica out of the corner of his eye.

As Bogie sank blissfully down to the floor, rolling slightly to offer his belly up to Michael for scratching, Michael asked Jessica, "How are you doing?"

Jessica smiled wanly and answered, her voice slightly hoarse from all the talking she'd recently done, "I've officially decided that this has been the weirdest day of my entire life, and that's _including_ my incredibly weird wedding day."

Michael chuckled wearily at that, saying, "Welcome to the Foundation. Weird is part of the job description."

Jessica could only chuckle in return before she continued, "But other than all the weirdness… Well, I'm exhausted. I was going to start in on medical files and then maybe have a look at brain scans tonight, but I really don't think I'll be able to keep my eyes open, much less concentrate, so I'll start in on them after I've had some sleep." Michael nodded understandingly, still working on rubbing and scratching at Bogie's belly while the dog drifted off into happy puppy sleep. Jessica smiled lovingly at her baby and then shifted her gaze to Michael, and there was concern in her voice as she asked, "How are _you_ doing, Michael?"

"Oh, I've been way better," Michael replied honestly, with a tired sigh. Then he shrugged as he quietly added, "It's always hard when something's happened to him."

"Does something happen to him often?" Jessica asked curiously.

Michael shook his head as he leaned over to give the sleeping Bogie's head a gentle pat and then sat up straight against the wall again.

"Honestly? I'm usually the one who takes most of the beatings, not Kitt," he answered with a wry chuckle. And then he smiled sadly and added, "Which is probably why it's so hard to deal with it when something happens to Kitt. None of us has had much practice at it."

Jessica smiled sadly, too, as Michael continued to speak.

"I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times when his life's been in danger over the past five and a half years," he said. "And really, it was only two, _maybe_ three, of those times that he was in extreme danger, when we thought that we might not be able to save him. The car's practically indestructible, and it takes a lot to get at Kitt himself. At least…it has until now."

Jessica nodded, understanding.

"And how is he doing?"

"He's…hanging in there. Bonnie's in there with him now, visiting a bit and saying good night, so I took the opportunity to take care of necessary functions and get myself yet more coffee. I think I'm up to about three gallons now," he said with a wry smirk.

Jessica chuckled at that as Michael took another gulp of his coffee, finishing it off, and then he gave Jessica a haunted look and said, "The truth is that he's terrified. And he's slipping. He had about ten of those little lapses he's been having in the last hour or so, and they're getting longer now, taking more from him each time."

"That's not good," Jessica murmured worriedly. In a way, Kitt's condition was not unlike the deterioration of a human being with a progressive neurological condition like Alzheimer's disease, but it was progressing much more quickly than any human disease progressed. And that was a very scary thing.

"No, it isn't good," Michael was agreeing. "He's trying to be all brave, putting up a front, probably because he doesn't want to worry me and he doesn't want me asking him if he's all right every thirty seconds, but…I know him, and I know what he's really feeling. The fact of the matter is that none of us, including Kitt himself, knows how long he can hold out against this thing before he'll have to…" His voice trailed off as he swallowed visibly, shuddered, and then crushed the styrofoam coffee cup in his hand, oblivious to the lukewarm coffee dregs that spilled over his fingers. "And I'm terrified, too," he whispered.

Jessica nodded again, understanding again, at the same time reflecting with not a little amazement that a little more than twelve hours before she wouldn't have understood at all. But Kitt and the situation surrounding him had managed to completely rip apart and then rebuild a large chunk of her universe in about eighteen hours. She said as much to Michael, amazement in her voice.

Michael smiled fondly and said, softly, "I know the feeling. Sometimes it seems like only yesterday that I was in that same place…" He paused for a moment, frowning at nothing, and then he asked, "Do you have any siblings, Jessica?"

Jessica blinked at the sudden and unexpected change of subject, and then answered, "Yes. Two sisters and a brother."

"Older or younger?" Michael asked.

Jessica frowned, still bewildered by the subject, and answered, "Both. My eldest sister is five years older than me and the other was almost two years older than me, but she died as a result of a car accident that my family was involved in when I was seven."

"That's terrible," Michael murmured sincerely. "I'm sorry."

Jessica smiled and answered, "It was a long time ago, but…thank you. She and I were very close, and her loss devastated me for…for a long time. Y'all have her to thank for me being here, though."

"How so?" Michael asked, his brow furrowed.

"She died of head injuries about two weeks after the accident. Ultimately, I chose to be a doctor and then to go into neurosurgery so that maybe I could prevent other people from having to suffer the same kind of loss that my family suffered. My daddy always wanted me to be a lawyer and then a judge like he was, but…" Her voice trailed off and she shrugged.

"I see," Michael answered with a solemn nod. "Well, then, thank you…What was her name?"

"Sarah," Jessica said softly. "Sarah Jane Sutton."

"Thank you, Sarah Jane Sutton," Michael said with an obligatory glance at the ceiling.

Jessica smiled at that. Returning to the subject at hand, she said, "And then my brother's almost sixteen years younger than me. The miracle baby. My mama was badly injured in the car accident, and she was told that she shouldn't have more children…but she went ahead and had one anyway, and very late in life, at that. His name is Michael, too, by the way." Michael smiled at that while Jessica affectionately added, "Lord, I doted on that baby as if he was my own. I was in my second year of med school when he was born, and I was _so_ thankful that because of my age I had to go local so that I could live at home. Being home meant that I could help mama with him and just…be around him. Hell, I still dote on him even though he's a bratty teenager now, getting ready to graduate from high school in a couple of years. He's always joked that he has three parents…"

"So you _really_ know what it's like, then," Michael quietly remarked, with an oddly decisive nod, as Jessica's voice trailed off.

Jessica shook her head uncertainly.

"I really know what what's like?" she asked curiously.

"What it's like to watch a little brother grow up," Michael answered. "Watching them learn new things every day, watching them discover the world around them, good and bad."

Jessica nodded, fondly adding, "Answering their endless questions and listening to and laughing at their stupid jokes and kissing their boo-boos and celebrating their little triumphs with them. Oh, and beating the crap out of the little shits who pick on them, of course."

"Yeah, all of that," Michael agreed with a grin. "And more. I was the baby of my family and I don't have kids, so I never got to do that. I never understood, never _appreciated_ how much of a joy watching someone else growing up could be. Not until Kitt came along."

Jessica nodded comprehendingly then, understanding what Michael was getting at. "Ah, I see," she murmured.

"He learns from me…but I learn from him, too," Michael continued. "He's become a part of me as much as any flesh-and-blood brother would be, and now… Now I might have to watch him die. Worse, I might have to watch him kill himself. I…really don't think I can do that, Jessica. I really don't. I've lost a lot of people in my life in a lot of different ways, and I've gotten through all those losses, but…he's different. He's very special."

Jessica swallowed, empathy welling within her, watching as tears swam in Michael's eyes before he blinked them away. She leaned across the distance between them to lay a hand on his forearm, and answered softly, "It's a very hard thing to live through. Believe me, I know. I was there when Sarah died, and…I'll never forget it. But if_ I_ have anything to say about it," she added with quiet confidence, giving his forearm an encouraging squeeze, "you will _not_ be forced to live through that, Michael. At least not right now. Not because of this."

Michael briefly laid his other hand over hers and said, simply, quietly, "Thanks, Jess." He paused and then added, "Wait, is 'Jess' OK? I know that 'Jessie' will get me fried like a green tomato, but…"

Jessica chuckled quietly and answered, "'Jess' is fine. It's what my family calls me, actually. But if y'all're letting yourself into the elite circle of people who call me Jess, then y'all should be aware of the consequences of that action."

"Consequences?" Michael echoed, raising his eyebrows questioningly.

"Mmm-hmmm," Jessica confirmed. "It means that I get to nag you endlessly, for one thing." She laid the drawl on exaggeratedly thick as she demonstratively nagged, "Y'all need to get yerself to bed, boy. Them circles under y'all's eyes is bigger than y'all's face."

Michael smirked at that, but he shook his head and answered her seriously, "I won't leave Kitt by himself. I'll nap in the car when I have to, but…Well, nowadays I sleep better in there than I do in a bed, anyway."

Jessica shook her head at that and said, "Well, like y'all said: Weird is in the job description."

Michael chuckled wryly at that and answered, "Yeah, especially in mine."

Jessica snorted and pushed herself to her feet as she announced, "Well, _I_ still require a bed, I'm afraid, so I'm going to go use mine now. Tell Bonnie and Kitt I said good night?"

Michael smiled up at her, nodded, and answered, "Sure will. Sleep well, Jess. And…thanks for stopping by." And then he reached up and gently grabbed her arm as he added sincerely, "In case I forget to say it later, I want you to know that I _really_ appreciate everything that you're doing, not to mention everything that you _will_ be doing."

Jessica smiled back and said, "It's my pleasure, Michael. Seriously. I'll see y'all later, huh?" Michael nodded in silent reply, let go of her arm, and then Jessica prodded Bogie gently with one foot to wake him up and she and her dog headed off for the guest cottage.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Next <strong>**time:** In the beginning of Part II of the story, see Part I of the results of Nightwind firing up her Awesome Research Skillz™. *rolls eyes* Gape in horror as she attempts to convince you that something that is, in reality, completely, utterly, absolutely, entirely, wholly, thoroughly, and totally impossible might, in fact, be remotely plausible. *laughs madly* Really, just don't think about it too much and you'll be all right. Anyway, Nightwind is not a brain surgeon, but she sometimes pretends to be one when writing fanfic... ;)_

_And as always: **Review****replies! **Lots of 'em again, I'm afraid. Just skip down to yours. Or skip them entirely, unless you like reading my weirdness…_

_**Emperatrizdelanoche:** Kitt says to go for the flannel. (And that he demands a bedtime story, a teddy bear, and a plate of warm, gooey chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk, but please don't feel like you have to give in to his demands because you'll only encourage him to make more demands. ;) ) Flannel is soft and fuzzy and comfy and warm and you don't slide out of bed while wearing it. ;) Assuming, of course, that it's cool enough to wear flannel where you live. It's certainly cool enough to wear it whereI live, up in the mountains of Colorado. Let's just say that I pity the kids going out trick-or-treating tonight. Brrrrrr!_

_And it's strange, but with the way that the show set things up, Kitt actually **would** be compelled to see himself as less worthy of survival than the scummiest human being on the planet. He'd sacrifice himself before he'd sacrifice Hitler. Honestly, I think they were a little too cautious, after KARR. ;) But on the other hand, I do think that as Kitt learns more, reasoning might be able to override programming, and he'll gain more and more of an ability to make moral judgment calls…but only to a certain point, I think. He is, at heart, a computer, and computers are inflexible. Yes or no. 1 or 0. Black or white. They don't see shades of grey. But then, Kitt, IMO, isn't **just** a computer, either. Thank goodness! ;)_

_**BuckleWinner:** Oh, that's totally fun that your name is Jessica! :) I'm happy for you, seriously! :) The character's name was a toss-up between Amanda and Jessica, two of my favorite girl names. In fact, the story was more than half-written with "Amanda," but I ended up changing it because Jessica shortens better, IMO, given that I'm not all that fond of "Mandy." Thank God for MS Word's automagic Find/Replace thingy or else I would have spent hours manually finding and changing all the instances of her name! *laughs*_

_**Lady****Yuri:** Yep, I certainly understand the frustration about slash, indeed. Which I have to take some of the blame for, since I write the stuff. It has rather eaten TF fic, indeed…which I'm afraid I'm partly responsible for, too. But in my defense, I don't do human/robot stuff because I think that, logistically, it wouldn't work all that well, not just in terms of size differences but in terms of differences in life span, among a few other things. And I don't write movie-verse stuff, in general. Just old cartoon stuff. I do like slash…but I also like variety and I also like stories where romantic relationships don't play a part at all, although I do tend to favor emotional stories, being female and all. But not all relationships have to be romantic. There is a lack of deep, platonic friendship in fanfic, I fear, and maybe that's why Brain has latched onto KR for the moment, to give itself a break from romantic mush. *laughs*_

_And don't worry. Rest assured that Kitt will demand his snuggles. 'Cuz it's just too cute and, in many ways, he **is** a child. So if you like, you can have the second round. Go bake some cookies to prepare. ;) Chocolate chip. Slightly underdone so that they're gooey, not crunchy. ;)_

_**Echoness:** I'm thinking…Vespurrs, maybe? :) If so, tell her I said "HIIIIIIII!" As for stealing my brain…You totally don't want it. There's some seriously scary crap in my grey matter. It's **much** safer to read what dribbles out of it, trust me. ;)_

_**CharmingCheyenne:** Whoops! Sorry for the mistakes at practice. I know how that is, in a way. I play the cello, often in an orchestra, and I have been known to get so distracted by the voices in my head while I'm playing that I totally lose my place and/or forget to turn pages, thus distracting (and pissing off) my stand partner, too. *laughs* It's especially bad when it happens at performances rather than just at rehearsals… *gulp*_

_But yeah, Kitt does need to realize his worth, indeed. It's just that it's hard when your thinking process on the subject is clouded by programming. But as I said to Emperatriz above, I think as he grows he'll gain the ability to see past programming, just like we all do as we learn to think for ourselves and not be driven to think what people tell us to think. He's young yet, especially in this story. (Which, too, is deliberate, of course. There is always a method to my madness. ;) Well, OK, there's **usually** a method to my madness.)_

_And…better? Dearest, he has to get much, **much** worse before he gets better. MWAHAHAHAHAHAH! *cough, sputter*_

_**Jalaperilo**: Somehow, I knew you'd pick up on the Angelo/Raoul connection. :) Yup, I love that character so much that I had to sort of squirt him into the KnightRider universe, or at least use him as a template._

_And Michael and Kitt are fun, yes; I love their dynamic even if I often tend to be less than thrilled with Michael. But yeah, they're definitely bros in mine own eyes. And hey, in homage to your clearly awesome brother, I added a line to this chapter before I posted it. Guess which one? :) I can't say my own brother (Well, half-brother, actually) ever knocked anyone cold on my behalf, but he and I were very close for all that we liked to bicker fiercely. So I guess that's why I'm feeling that kind of relationship with Michael and Kitt, now that I think about it._

_And I'm glad you like ol' Jess here. She has developed into a pretty interesting person in my own mind, at least, and…Well, sometimes she isn't the most diplomatic person on Earth, I'm afraid. She's no-nonsense, definitely. And way too smart (and she isn't afraid to let everyone else know it) and way too opinionated for her own good. Sound like any Trans Ams we know? :) As for her and Bonnie… Heh, they've got some serious Gurl Genius Powah! goin' on. Which is why I wanted the surgeon character to be female. :)_

_*wanders off, singing "Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves."*_


	7. Chapter 7

_OK, so I lied a little. You don't get **all** of Part I of the results of my Awesome Research Skillz™ in this chapter. I broke what I had intended to post as one chapter into two because otherwise it was kind of long. **Really** long, actually. Yikes. Still, there are **some** results of research in this thing. You'll just have to wait 'til next time for the rest of the dose… I'll just bet that you can't wait, huh? *laughs* Anyway, on with the bluffing and the bullsh*tting!_

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><p>Inspiration had an odd and annoying habit of striking Jessica at the most awful and inconvenient hours of the day. The glowing clock on the bedside table read 2:17AM when she awoke suddenly, abruptly jerking out of deep sleep. Her throat was dry and her brain was fuzzy and only half-awake at best; she'd gone to bed less than three hours before. The guest cottage's bedroom was dimly illuminated by the light she'd left on in the adjoining bathroom, and it was silent but for Bogie's light snoring. He was stretched out across the foot of the bed, and his snoring certainly wasn't loud enough to have awakened her. But <em>something<em> had awakened her…

Frowning in hazy, vague annoyance, she levered herself up onto one elbow to grab the glass of water that she kept on the bedside table for just such instances of nocturnal thirst. She took a drink, fully intending to flop right back against the bed's decadently fluffy pillows and go back to sleep. Instead, something flashed in her brain, so suddenly and so brightly that she gasped and then dropped the glass of water that she was holding. The thick carpeting and the even thicker padding underneath it meant that the glass didn't shatter on impact, but the water did splatter all over the place.

"Damn," Jessica muttered dazedly, but she didn't give the water any further thought. She didn't even pick up the glass. Instead, she thrashed wildly in order to disentangle herself from the covers – She'd always been a restless sleeper; Phillip complained about it constantly – and then rolled out of bed. She staggered out into the living area and blindly fumbled around for the light switch in the still-unfamiliar room.

She'd spent the morning of her second day at the FLAG mansion poring over medical files and the sets of scans that had been performed on the brain of the young man whose life she'd be destroying. She had a full series of CT scans, but she was surprised and particularly impressed to find that she also had a set of color-enhanced PET scans at her disposal. According to the date stamp on the films, the scans had been performed just before the patient had been transferred out of the hospital and into the Foundation's custody, so it had obviously been done on Devon's order, not the young man's attending physician. She supposed that she shouldn't have been surprised; she'd already learned that Devon did tend to think of everything. Still, while PET technology had long been used in research, it had only recently been adapted for use in medical imaging and diagnosis, so the technology was new and therefore both hideously expensive and not widely available. She had only recently learned how to interpret PET scans, herself. But the set was a major asset because, while the CT scans showed anatomical structure, the PET scans showed physiological function, which in the particular case at hand was of greater importance than the structural scans.

Jessica hadn't had as much time as she would have liked to digest either set of scans because Bonnie had wanted her input on what she and her team had devised so far. So she'd spent the afternoon and well into the night with that clan of clearly brilliant albeit somewhat odd people, and she'd discovered in Bonnie something of a kindred spirit as well as an intellect that was capable of keeping up with her own. That made Bonnie a very rare creature, indeed. Although the two women didn't entirely speak each other's technical languages, they'd found quite a lot of common ground between their two fields of expertise despite the language barrier. And, on a personal level, they'd quickly discovered that they worked well together, their knowledge bases and their personalities blending harmoniously rather than clashing, which made Bonnie an even rarer creature because Jessica had a distinct and unfortunate tendency to clash with most other people when it came to intellectual endeavors. But by the time Jessica had gone off to bed at around 11PM, she and Bonnie had worked out some snags that Bonnie and her team had run into, and they were already finishing each other's sentences, which Bonnie's team had unanimously decided was very, very scary.

But during all the time that she'd been with Bonnie, it was clear to Jessica now that her brain had been chewing on those scans in the background. It was how her brain tended to work, contemplating and working on problems on a subconscious level while her conscious mind was busy processing other, entirely unrelated, things. The unfortunate result was that her brain would sometimes finish compiling data at very odd hours of the day…and then it would often wake her out of a sound sleep, as it had just done.

After she finally found the light switch and flipped on the lights in the living area, wincing and squinting in the sudden brightness, Jessica stumbled over to the small dining table, where the scan films were still stacked more or less neatly in a small pile, with just a few of them scattered over the table's surface. She fumbled impatiently through them, holding each of them in turn up into the light from the ceiling fixture above the table and squinting at them until she found the ones that she wanted. Then she turned and lurched to the refrigerator. She pulled open its door, holding the top edge of each of the scans she needed a closer look at up against the bottom edge of the freezer door, using the lighted refrigerator compartment as a very makeshift light box. Narrowing her eyes, she scrutinized each of the scans, fervently hoping that her brain hadn't merely been feverishly imagining things, that it hadn't just been seeing what it wanted to see.

It hadn't been, and she found that she couldn't, and didn't want to, hold back a triumphant little yell.

Hurriedly, she used both hands to carefully roll up the scan films like a roll of wrapping paper while she simultaneously kicked the refrigerator door closed with one bare foot. Then she headed for the door. She didn't bother changing out of her pajamas. She didn't bother with a jacket even though the night air had a distinct chill to it. She left her hair in the two messy braided pigtails she customarily put it in so that she could sleep without it doing its best to strangle her. She didn't even bother with shoes. She just barreled out of the door and headed for the garage at a dead run, the scan films firmly gripped in one hand like a relay runner's baton.

* * *

><p>Kitt never slept in the human sense, and in his current state, he couldn't afford even to power down as he normally would. He had to stay fully alert and vigilant. This, Jessica knew. And she figured that he would be able to answer her questions so that she wouldn't have to bother Bonnie.<p>

Yet.

"Kitt, can you tell me if—" she gasped out as she burst into the garage bay as if she'd been propelled into it by a catapult. But her words died abruptly in her throat and she pulled up suddenly as she noticed Michael asleep in the driver's seat. "Oh, God, I'm sorry," she automatically apologized, lowering her voice significantly. "It didn't even occur to me that Michael might be…"

"It's all right," Kitt replied after a moment, a longer moment than his response time should have been, longer than it had been when she'd peeked in on him and said good night before she'd gone off to bed. "He sleeps…like a log," Kitt continued, the pause in his voice obvious and, to Jessica, distressing, as was the fact that his words were slurring a bit, which they hadn't been doing when she'd last seen him. "You wouldn't…believe the things I've had to do…to wake him up sometimes," Kitt finished weakly.

Jessica gaped at Kitt as she panted for breath, her eyes wide. She gaped not because of what he'd said but because he'd so obviously slipped since she had last seen him, a mere few hours before. She bleated out the first stupid thing that came to her mind.

"Are you all right?" she asked around gasping attempts to catch her breath.

"No," Kitt answered, as usual. "But still not…in imminent danger. Just…getting worse."

"Should I get Bonnie?" Jessica asked, alarmed, as she finally caught her breath.

"She was already here," Kitt answered. "You missed her…by about an hour. She went back to the lab…to crack the whip. I'm…all right for now. I think," he added uncertainly.

"Jesus," Jessica muttered. She limped gingerly over to Kitt, suddenly regretting not having put on shoes when she'd fled the guest cottage. She'd apparently cut, scraped, and bruised the soles of her feet in the course of her headlong flight to the garage. She hadn't really felt it, until now, because euphoric adrenaline had been driving her. Now, her feet were suddenly killing her, so she sank down on the concrete floor in front of Kitt and leaned back so that her shoulder blades were against the prow of the Trans Am. "What happened?" she asked Kitt quietly.

"I lost…a big chunk," Kitt answered after another lengthy delay in his response time. "I can't see…and I can't move anymore. In fact, I don't have control…of much of anything anymore."

"Jesus," Jessica repeated, horrified, reflexively reaching back to stroke what she could reach of the hood of the car, even though she wasn't sure if Kitt could perceive the touch anymore. In fact, she wasn't sure that he'd ever been able to do so; she was only assuming that he could since _everyone_ seemed to absently pat or stroke him whenever the car was within arm's reach. But now he had been suddenly immobilized and blinded, like being shoved into a pitch-black box that was so tiny that he couldn't move and from which there was no escape. Anyone would need a bit of comforting, a bit of reassurance that someone else was there, in that sort of situation. Deep empathy latched onto Jessica's heart with a fierce death grip, and she swallowed as she realized with sickening foreboding that they were very low on time now.

"At least," Kitt said, trying to see the bright side. "I can still hear…and talk. Michael said that talking…would be the last thing to go."

Despite herself, Jessica chuckled and commented, "He _would_ say something like that."

"He was…trying to keep my spirits up," Kitt answered in Michael's defense. "At least, I think he was…" He was quiet for a long moment, and then he asked, "You were going to…ask me something, Jessica?"

Jessica shook her head, forgetting for a moment that Kitt couldn't see her anymore. Remembering that, she made a move to rise to her sore feet and said, "No, it's all right, Kitt. I can ask Bonnie. I didn't want to disturb her, but if she's—"

"No!" Kitt interrupted, a very noticeable note of panic in his voice, and he only became more obviously distressed as he continued, "Please, no. Don't leave me. It's so nice to…hear a voice. I know that…Michael's here, but he's exhausted and I don't want to—"

"Whoa, hey, it's OK," Jessica responded soothingly as she promptly plopped herself back down on her butt, hard enough that her tailbone twinged at her. "It's OK. I'll stay."

"Thank you," Kitt responded, and it was transparently obvious that he was greatly relieved to have company that wasn't sound asleep. Jessica's heart lurched into her throat in response, refusing all subsequent attempts to swallow it back down.

"Do you think you might be up to answering some techie kind of questions?" Jessica asked quietly after a moment.

"I'll…do my best," Kitt answered.

"OK," Jessica said, doing _her_ best to convey a smile in her voice. "I'm trying to figure out if there are similarities between how your systems are designed and how they work and interact with each other and how the human central nervous system is designed and how it works and interacts."

After a lag, Kitt asked, "Why?"

Jessica smiled. He might be struggling harder now, but Kitt's curiosity was apparently fully intact.  
>"Because," she answered, "I think I might have come up with a way to make this whole task easier and, more importantly, much faster to complete. And hopefully it'll make it easier on y'all, too."<p>

"Easier on me? How?" Kitt asked weakly.

"I'm thinking," Jessica answered, "that if the new system is like the current one, it'll make it easier for y'all to adjust."

"You're probably right," Kitt quietly agreed after a worryingly long pause. "Assuming…that it will be possible to adjust at all, that is," he added dismally.

Jessica frowned and asked, "What do you mean?"

"Putting me into a human body," Kitt answered, still quietly, "is like setting a man down on Mars…and then just expecting him to survive."

Jessica swallowed and said, "Now that y'all mention it, I suppose it is. It must be pretty frightening, huh?"

"It is," Kitt confirmed softly, simply, and, indeed, fear was very evident in his voice. "Honestly, I don't know…if I'll be able to survive. At least, not in any…functional way. I think…I'll be lost. Completely overwhelmed. I think I might go insane…if it's possible for me to go insane."

Jessica bit her lip, reaching back to stroke the hood of the car again. "You know we're going to do everything we can to prevent that, right?" she gently reassured him.

"Of course," Kitt answered. "I simply…have less confidence in me…than everyone else has. However, I realize that…I also have little choice now. It's too late to…try a different tactic."

Jessica smiled sadly and answered quietly, "That's true." She gave the hood of the car a pat and said, seriously and sincerely, "It'll be OK, Kitt. I will do _everything_ that I possibly can to make this work and to make it as easy on you as possible. I swear."

The very thready but deeply relieved "Thank you" that Kitt whispered back at her just about ripped Jessica's heart out of her throat, since it had already migrated there from her chest. That was one promise, she realized, that she _had_ to keep, no two ways about it. The responsibility of the promise fell on her like a ton of bricks dropped from a very great height, but it was a responsibility that she was willing to bear.

"You're welcome," she answered him softly. "But that being the case," she continued, "there are some things I'd like to know, bearing in mind that I am _not_ a computer person."

"Fire away," Kitt replied gamely.

"First, do you have separate…um, connections to every individual system in the car?" Jessica asked. "By that I mean do you _directly_ control every system in the car?"

"No," Kitt answered after a pause. "There is a subprocessor…that collates all of the data from the car. It has links to each of the car's systems…and is separate from but slaved to my main processor. I query the subprocessor…whenever I need information about the car. Diagnostics, for instance."

"And what about when you give a command _to_ the car, say to shift the transmission into reverse, for example?"

Kitt answered after the expected lag, "I send the command…to the same subprocessor. It relays the command…to the appropriate system…in the car. The system was designed this way…so that I can be more easily removed…from the car when necessary, in emergencies."

Jessica smiled, encouraged, and then asked, "And what about sensory input? Audio, visual, olfactory, tactile?"

"There is…another slaved subprocessor that…similarly collates all the information coming in from…all sensory perceptors. I don't normally…send it commands, however. That's more of a…one-way information stream."

Jessica nodded happily, and then remembered that Kitt couldn't see the gesture. She said, "That's good, Kitt. It's _perfect_, in fact."

"It is?" Kitt weakly responded.

"It is," Jessica confirmed. "In fact, I'd say that Bonnie's more of a brain surgeon than she thinks she is. Because y'all have direct technological equivalents of the midbrain and the thalamus, respectively. Which means…" she added with a huge grin, "that I think my idea is going to work." She got gingerly to her feet then and winced, _really_ regretting that she hadn't taken a second to put on shoes, and then she gently, apologetically added, "I need to go talk to Bonnie right away, Kitt. So I'm going to wake up Michael."

"No," Kitt immediately protested. "He—"

"Yes," Jessica insistently interrupted. "He has the rest of his life to sleep. I'm not going to leave y'all all by yourself like this. And if y'all know what's good for you, you will _not_ argue with me."

Kitt thought about arguing anyway…but in the end, he realized that he really _didn__'__t_ want to be alone, frozen in place and literally in the dark. He also realized that Jessica's idea, whatever it was, was likely critical, definitely important to his very survival. She had to leave so that she could consult with Bonnie. So he said, "I won't argue. Just this once," he added, trying for lightness.

Jessica smiled at that and then patted the roof of the car gently as she approached its cabin. And then she opened the driver's side door and yelled at the top of her lungs, "RISE AND SHINE, MICHAEL!"

Her volume was very impressive for someone of her tiny size, and Michael's entire body jerked satisfactorily as he woke up.

"Jesus!" he responded unthinkingly, reflexively. And then he blinked blearily at Jessica. "What the hell are _you_ doing here?" he asked dazedly of her.

Jessica grinned sweetly and answered lightly, "Why, using my enormous brain to solve all our problems, of course. Now be a dear, stay awake, and keep Kitt company, would you? I have to go talk to Bonnie." And then, without further ado or explanation, she spun around on one bare heel and began to limp away.

For a long moment, Michael frowned silently at all of it. The limping. The tiny bare feet and the pigtails and the oversized pink flannel pajamas printed with multiple iterations of Eeyore from Winnie-the-Pooh, all of which conspired together with her tininess to make Jessica look like nothing so much as a twelve-year-old. And, finally, he frowned at what Jessica had actually said.

"Wha…?" he eventually, blearily responded, shaking his head in confusion and then clumsily pushing himself out of the Trans Am's cabin.

But Jessica had already limped to the door and was gone.

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><p><em>And there's your bit of self-insertion for this story: Jessica's brainstorms occur to her the same way that writing ideas occur to me, waking me up in the middle of the night out of a dead sleep. *snicker* Only I generally get up and stagger, half-asleep, to my laptop when they happen, not to a pile of brain scans. ;)<em>

_Anyway, **review**** replies!**_

_**In ****general: **Geez, y'all are a bunch of softies. *laughs* If you're crying and wanting to hug now…Well, let's just say that y'all better invest in a bunch of boxes of Kleenex. ;)_

_**Melody**** Phoenix:** "Junkyard Dog" is a very hurtful episode, yes. But I watched the 4th-season opener last night before bed, and Kitt getting smashed up by that battering ram actually made me sick. Seriously, I had to hit the fast-forward. I'm surprised I didn't have nightmares. I guess I've been far too corrupted by being a Transformers fan. When I see car accidents now, I almost feel worse for the cars than for any people involved. *rolls eyes* And watching "Knight of the Juggernaut"…Yow, I don't think I **ever** want to see that again… *shudders*_

_And I got your PM. Very, **very** interesting. I will need to look into that more. The story's already written, but if there's something in there that might be relevant to how I already wrote it, I might adjust it a bit before I "publish" it. I always like to try to be as realistic as possible in my writing, and although I'm constrained by the fact that this story takes place in 1988, not 2011, and I want to be faithful to that, it's helpful to have input from the "future," anyway. Thanks very much for the heads-up! :D_

_**CharmingCheyenne:** *hands over a box of Kleenex* Rascal Flatts rawx. :) Well, I'm glad you're cheering for hurting, 'cuz there's more hurting to come. *cough*And not just for Kitt. *cough* As for my "talent"…Well, I do thank you for the compliments, to be sure, but really it's just conditioning. I've been writing all my life, starting when I was about five, but seriously writing since I was 12, and for me that was…um *does math*…Damn, 34 years ago. I've even been published, but not in any way that anyone would know or could find now. In any case, it's not talent, really. Just a lot of practice. And fanfic's just fun. Way more fun and way less stressful than writing original stuff, since a lot of the hard work – Like the world building and creating and developing characters – is already done for you. I do it to relax, more than anything. For me, writing fanfic is like drinking a nice, soothing cup of tea._

_**Lady****Yuri:** Ah yes, I understand the frustration. Looking for deep, platonic friendship in fanfic is…Well, good luck. :) There's some out there; not **everyone** twists everything into romance and, eventually, inevitably, sex. But the truth is that a lot of fanfic is written to fulfill the writer's fantasies. And I'm no less guilty of that than any other fanfic writer, so I'm not saying that to be judgmental at all. It's just how it is. But sometimes you'll find a writer with occasionally purer intentions, if you will. I'm currently enjoying writing not-romance, which I guess is why I'm stuck on _Knight Rider_. *laughs*_

_Anyway, according to Kitt…Cookies from the bakery are OK, so long as they aren't too cakey and you warm them up. He's a picky little soul, ain't he? :) And yes, he needs sisters! He already has a mama in Bonnie and, in my head, a second one in Jessica. And he has an older brother, of course. But sisters would be really good for him. They love differently than mamas do, and he needs more female influence in his life. Michael is dangerous. *laughs* But, dangerous or not, I'm sure Michael will accept hugs. ;)_

_**Empertrizdelanoche:** You know, you are putting all sorts of adorable pictures into my head. That can be very, **very** dangerous. And you're totally spoiling Kitt rotten, too. He may never leave, kind of like how when you feed and pay attention to a stray dog they never leave. They just follow you around all over the place, giving you puppy-dog eyes and hoping for more food and petting. *laughs* But I totally understand melting in the face of Kitt's adorableness and then weakly caving to his demands. I do it, too. Only in my case, it results in stories. *laughs*_

_But yeah, I think I'd sacrifice three quarters of the planet before I'd sacrifice Kitt. Including the pope. (But I'm not Catholic anymore, so that isn't much of a sacrifice. ;) Then again, I am lately finding myself leaning more into Catholicism. I even went to Mass this past Sunday. But that's beside the point. *laughs*) Certainly, all of the politicians (and the lawyers) would go before Kitt would! *laughs* Anyway, rest assured that I only kill characters that I hate, and characters that I hate are few and far between. And I don't hate any of the regular characters on _Knight Rider_…although there's one character who irks me. But I'll say no more about that._

_**Jalaperilo:** OK, so I had to go look up "Nakama." And…Yeah, I love that concept. I guess it appeals to me because my ties to my own genetic family are…Well, they're not strong. *laughs* So, I seek family elsewhere, and I guess that bleeds over into what I write and what I like to watch. Most of the shows that I like feature groups of people who are close-knit, bound by ties that go beyond friendship and mundane things like genetic relationship. That and the very sharp, witty writing is why I adore _Firefly_, for instance. Yep, that's me. You've totally psychoanalyzed me. *laughs*_

_And yeah, Kitt does get his yearly makeover, doesn't he? *snicker* I'm surprised he didn't get one after becoming friends with Goliath. And I totally wish he hadn't gotten one for the 4th season. Super Pursuit is just…silly. Which is why I ignore it. I also ignore the convertible thing because, IMO, Kitt looks better NOT convertible. *laughs*_

_**Luna:** I have an unfortunate tendency to get totally attached to cars. I always have. I remember I actually almost cried when I traded in my first one in order to buy a new one. In fact, I did cry when I got home. Seriously, I did. I felt so bad for my old car, leaving him behind, knowing he'd probably end up junked and stripped for parts. It's weird, but I guess I've always seen inanimate objects as living, in a sense. I remember this one time when I was little, maybe five or so, and my mother said that she would buy me one stuffed animal. I had to choose between two that I really liked, and I felt bad for the one I didn't pick because I'd rejected it. I cried for that one, even, not because I wanted to try to make my mother buy both but just because I thought I'd hurt the stuffed animal's feelings. I think there's something wrong with me… *laughs* So, I guess it's not surprising that I can easily see Kitt as a "person," not a thing. I'm convinced that my new desktop computer is a person, too…and that it's out to get me. I upgraded its RAM, and the darn thing bit me, dammit! *laughs*_

_Anyway, the "transition" is coming very soon, so you won't have too long to wait. :)_

_And with that…I'm outta here. :)_


	8. Chapter 8

_Ugh. Wanted to post this yesterday, but my internet connection was being poopie. :p My DSL modem died. Thankfully, my ISP is small and local, so I could run into town this morning and trade it in for one that works. *laughs* But anyway…better late than never, I guess. :) Now, prepare for techie overload…_

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><p>"This was a crazy, impossible idea," Bonnie forlornly informed the wall across from her. She was sitting at her workstation in her lab, nursing a massive headache and trying not to allow despair to completely swallow her.<p>

A second later, Jessica practically bounced into the lab and chirped "Hi!" in a voice that was much too cheerful, given the situation and the fact that it was a little after 3:30AM. Bonnie shot an annoyed look at the surgeon…who certainly didn't look all that much like a surgeon at the moment, what with the pigtails, the bare feet, and the Eeyore pajamas.

"What are you doing here?" Bonnie asked, bewildered.

"I had me a brainstorm," Jessica explained. "And I went to talk to Kitt about it, only to find…"

"That he's not feeling so well, at the moment," Bonnie supplied.

"Yes," Jessica answered sadly. "But…he was able to answer my questions, and I think this is going to work…"

"No, it isn't," Bonnie countered. "It's a crazy, impossible idea that can't_ possibly_ be completed in the time that Kitt has left. We should abandon this whole idea, start building a new mainframe and—"

"No, we shouldn't," Jessica answered happily.

Bonnie gave her another annoyed look.

"What on Earth do you have to be so cheerful about?" Bonnie grumbled. "If we had years we could _maybe_ engineer all of this software, but Kitt doesn't even have—"

"That's OK," Jessica interrupted serenely, "because y'all don't need all that software."

"Of course we do!" Bonnie exasperatedly exclaimed. "Once Kitt's in there, his survival will depend on that body functioning as it should. So he'll need…everything that you and I need, and in order to have all that, he'll need software. Lots and _lots_ of software."

"No, he won't," Jessica blithely insisted. She approached Bonnie then and leaned across her workstation. Her expression was an odd combination of manic excitement laced with something that was possibly confusion, as if she herself didn't quite understand from where her plan had come. She announced imploringly, "Don't you see? Y'all're plugging the hardware into the wrong place!"

Bonnie, slightly disturbed by the strange and intense look on Jessica's face, frowned, stood up, circled to the other side of her workstation, and then sat herself on the corner of it.

"Excuse me?" she answered.

"Y'all've been thinking that y'all have to replace the whole thing, the whole brain, right?" Jessica said.

"Yes?" Bonnie answered uncertainly, still frowning.

"Well, that's just not the right way to do it!" Jessica firmly and excitedly insisted.

When Bonnie just gave her a blank look, Jessica rolled her eyes and looked around herself, her eyes eventually settling on a currently-unused computer monitor. It was sitting on the long, narrow, continuous workbench that lined one wall of Bonnie's lab, and it seemed to have a light-enough background. She went to it, unrolling the PET scan films she'd been carrying and then propping one of them against the computer monitor, using the monitor as an improvised light box. It worked well enough, and she gestured at the scan with a dramatic flourish, as if it explained everything.

"We need to use the _existing_ software," Jessica announced. "And a big ol' chunk of the existing hardware while we're at it," she added, and when Bonnie continued to stare at her, her expression clearly indicating that she had no idea what Jessica was proposing, Jessica approached her again. She reached out to her, laid a hand on each of her shoulders, and then shook her gently as she almost manically exclaimed, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

Bonnie, bewildered, was wondering if Jessica had snapped, thinking that perhaps she wasn't as impervious to fatigue and sleep deprivation as she claimed to be. But then, from somewhere that Bonnie couldn't identify, something suddenly clicked in her own brain, too.

"He isn't on full life support," Bonnie found herself whispering, almost without realizing that she was saying anything at all. Jessica knew then that the light was starting to dawn in the other woman's impressive brain, and she smiled triumphantly.

"No! He isn't!" she crowed as she hitched herself up onto the workbench next to her improvised light box, in order to take her weight of her feet. "He's on a ventilator in order to keep his blood oxygen levels high, to help preserve what's left of his brain, but I'm certain that he'd be capable of breathing on his own if he were weaned off of it. And every other autonomic function seems to be working well enough." She pointed at the scan leaning against the monitor next to her. "All of which isn't surprising since this cross-section here clearly shows that the hindbrain, the midbrain, the cerebellum, the basal ganglia, even the diencephalon with the exception of some damage to the right-side node of the thalamus that _might_ be a problem, but…" She let her voice trail off as she noticed the increasingly blank look that Bonnie was giving her. She smiled and said, "What I mean is, this scan shows that everything that controls the body's autonomic functions is still working at least fairly well, if not perfectly well. The corresponding CT scan shows that all of it is remarkably undamaged, structurally, too. In fact, the damage is pretty much _all_ in the cerebral cortices. Which is something of a miracle, but…there it is."

"So…" Bonnie said slowly, nodding now, "you're saying that there's no reason to remove and replace the undamaged components with technological equivalents."

"Exactly!" Jessica answered, happily swinging her feet such that her heels smacked loudly against the wall underneath the workbench she was sitting on. Increasingly animated demonstrative hand gestures indicated her rising excitement as she continued, talking very fast, "The brain… In some ways, it's like a massively complex computer program, at least as I understand computer programs. It's extremely compartmentalized, different parts of it simultaneously handling different functions, just as the different sections of a program's code simultaneously do different things. And while the brain is all interconnected, all interlinked chemically via neurotransmitters as well as with actual physical connections, many of its components can operate independently from other components. That's _especially_ so in the case of the more primitive components, since the cerebral cortex is, in essence, an evolutionary add-on to begin with. But the more primitive components are _exactly _the components that we're talking about here."

"So you're saying," Bonnie interpreted after thinking about what Jessica had said for a moment, her voice betraying something like a flare of hope as she nodded with increasing comprehension, "that we should only worry about the higher functions and leave the rest to the undamaged system already in place."

"Yes, exactly so," Jessica confirmed with a smile. "The undamaged components'll run that body just fine and dandy if I don't yank 'em out. So in your terms…the operating system's already there. Y'all just have to figure out how to write software that'll run on top of it."

Bonnie snorted and echoed, ruefully, "'Just.'"

Jessica smiled fractionally.

"Hey, y'all work your miracle, I'll work mine," she said with a shrug. "Speaking of which," she added pointedly as she switched scans, "check this out." She was grinning widely, almost disturbingly, just like the Cheshire cat.

"What?" Bonnie prompted after a moment when Jessica didn't seem inclined to say anything else. She had no hope of interpreting a PET scan, after all.

"Just before I came over here," Jessica answered quietly, "Kitt told me that once moved he was afraid that he'd be completely overwhelmed, even that he wouldn't be able to function at all, that it would all be a kind of insanity and that he'd be…lost."

Bonnie blinked at that, surprised. She was not necessarily surprised at Kitt's lack of confidence; she shared it, in fact. She _was_ surprised that Kitt had admitted to such a lack of confidence, especially to someone he had just met. Even with those to whom he was closest, he wasn't usually enthusiastic about admitting to any kind of vulnerability, not unless doing so conveniently got him out of doing something that he didn't want to do. That he had admitted to such a lack of confidence was, to Bonnie, a glowing, blaring sign that his defenses were gone, and that worried her, tore at her.

Her baby was dying by inches. She'd been trying to put that terrible knowledge out of her mind so that she'd be able to focus on what she needed to do, once the crazy and impossible plan to save him had been formulated and put into motion. But the thought still nagged at her constantly, nevertheless, if only in the back of her mind. Especially now, with the condition that he was in, blinded and immobilized and with his functions slowing due to sheer loss of code and processing power. It was horrifying, terrifying. The rope that he was clinging to was unraveling rapidly, and he would plummet into the abyss soon, unless…

Bonnie shook herself, in order to respond to what Jessica had said.

"It…will be a lot of data, yes," Bonnie agreed. "And much of it will be incomprehensible to him because he won't have any kind of frame of reference. So… Yes, it's very likely that it will completely overwhelm him, especially at first. The sensory input alone will be exponentially more than he's used to receiving, much less processing. But…hopefully, he'll adjust, given time."

Jessica nodded, understanding, and then she gave Bonnie a sly look.

"Would an extra processor help?" she asked, raising one eyebrow questioningly and perhaps a bit mischievously.

Bonnie blinked again, and then she shrugged and answered, "Well…sure. But…?"

Jessica grinned as Bonnie's voice trailed off, and she lightly tapped the PET scan with one fingertip.

"I believe," she said quietly, "that I can salvage some of the left hemisphere."

"Really?" Bonnie responded incredulously, blinking at her.

Jessica nodded.

"Yes. Because really, despite my initial assumption, this boy is _not_ entirely brain dead. I mean, the entire right hemisphere of his brain is hosed, true," she said, gesturing at the PET scan. "Dark blue means inactive tissue – dead, in this case," Jessica explained, "and…Well, there it is. You can see that the right side's all blue all the time. It took all of the initial hits when its capillary network exploded, and it might as well be a Jell-O mold now."

Bonnie half-smiled, amused at Jessica's turn of phrase.

"But the _left_ side," Jessica continued, "'only' sustained collateral damage, so to speak, mostly due to increased intracranial pressure from the hemorrhaging in the right side. That caused massive damage, as you can see by all the blue over there, too. But then there's this, which _my_ brain has apparently been chewing on all day. I didn't even consciously notice it when I looked at these scans this morning," she said with a shrug as she pulled out the third PET scan she'd brought with her, using it to replace the previous one that she'd set against her improvised light box. Bonnie didn't know what she was looking at at all, only that the new scan showed areas of pale yellow-green amongst blotches of blue.

"This is some of the deeper tissue in the left hemisphere of the brain," Jessica explained, "which was more protected from the pressure increase than the outer tissue. Some of these areas are still getting oxygen even now. The tissue's still intact, still alive, and it's still showing very faint electrical activity, which you can see here in the greenish bits."

Jessica paused, glancing at Bonnie, who nodded to indicate that she understood what Jessica was saying.

"Now," Jessica continued, "it's not _nearly_ enough to have saved this poor child …but his brain is _not_ all gone. So while he will never regain consciousness because there's just not enough brain left, technically he is _not_ brain dead. Which, for us, is actually a _very_ good thing. Because I'm _certain_ that I can salvage the left hemisphere's interface with the _corpus __callosum_ all along here_,_" Jessica explained, indicating a rather long stretch of pale yellow-green on the scan. "And I _think_ I can salvage a chunk of the surrounding tissue while I'm in there. Maybe a quarter of the hemisphere or so, if I'm lucky and all goes well. And if I can do both of those things, then that might help Kitt…and it will _certainly_ help you."

Bonnie frowned.

"The _corpus__ callosum_," she echoed, trying to remember the basic anatomy that she'd learned in high school. Finally, she accessed the right file and said, "That's the thingy that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, right?"

Jessica chuckled and answered, "To use the _really_ technical terms, yes. That's the thingy."

"Hey, _you_ don't speak computer, _I_ don't speak brain surgeon," Bonnie groused. After a moment, while Jessica continued to chuckle, Bonnie added, "I can see how that might help Kitt. The brain is a far more powerful computer than we could ever design, and if any of it can be salvaged and Kitt can then somehow access it and harness its processing power alongside the technological processing power, then…Well, that would be extremely helpful to him, yes. But how does it help me?"

"Because," Jessica answered, slowly releasing a long-held breath as she spoke, "the _corpus__ callosum_ is a big mass of densely-packed neural fiber that at some point either directly or indirectly channels all of the electrical and neurochemical activity in the brain. So _that__'__s_ where we need to plug in the new hardware." She slipped down off the workbench then and began to pace almost excitedly, ignoring her sore feet, as she continued, "And that means that y'all only have to design a single physical interface, one that can be spliced to a carefully dissected cross-section of the _corpus __callosum_. Because if there's access to the _corpus __callosum_," Jessica finished, "then there's relatively easy and simultaneous access to every part of the brain that's still functional, with all of the necessary software _already_ in place and up and running. So I'm thinking…excise the right hemisphere and all the necrotic tissue in the left hemisphere, use the freed-up space for the new hardware, plug it into the _corpus__ callosum,_and_…_good to go."

Bonnie swallowed, awed.

"Whoa," was her only response for a moment.

"Yeah," Jessica confirmed, stopping her pacing and offering Bonnie a grin. "Whoa. And here's the really happy fun part, just for icing on the cake: From what Kitt just told me, he's used to interacting with his body and his senses via subprocessors which are slaved to his main processor. In other words, he's _not_ used to directly and minutely controlling everything. And if we do things this way…he'll be operating in _exactly_ the same way in the new environment, except that the subprocessors will be wholly organic, namely the midbrain along with a few bits of the hindbrain and the thalamus…assuming that that bit of damage on the right-side node of the thalamus isn't too much of a problem…" She shrugged and grimaced as her voice trailed off.

Bonnie was staring at the PET scan, meanwhile, but then she blinked and turned her head to lock her gaze with Jessica's.

"And you can make all this happen?" she asked.

Jessica hesitated for a moment. She bit down on her lower lip, thinking, and she turned her head to stare, squinting, at the scan for a moment.

But then she nodded decisively and said, "Yes." It wasn't an uncertain "I think so," but a thoroughly confident "Yes." She glanced over at Bonnie, saw her plainly displayed skepticism, and added, "Oh, sure, it'll be totally unprecedented microsurgery, the kind that would make me instantly world-famous if I could talk about it." Bonnie chuckled wryly at that while Jessica continued, "We do sometimes sever the _corpus__ callosum_ in patients with severe epilepsy because doing so disrupts chaotic electrical signals between the brain's hemispheres that cause debilitating seizures. The brain eventually compensates and forms new synaptic pathways to…Well, to do what it needs to do. In that case, the idea is _not_ to be able to subsequently plug the _corpus__ callosum_ into something else, but preserving it _can_ be done. In theory, anyway." She smiled as she turned her head to look at Bonnie again, and she said, "And you and I _are_ miracle workers, are we not?"

"I suppose we are," Bonnie answered, smiling back, something like hope starting to shine in her eyes.

Then Jessica sighed and added, "Of course, even assuming that all goes well and everything works when we're done – and that's a honkin' big assumption – there's at least one potential side effect that I can think of."

"What's that?" Bonnie asked, her burgeoning smile turning abruptly into a frown.

Jessica pulled in a deep, hesitant breath, blew it out, and then answered, "Well, we've learned a lot about the brain over the years. If I'm forced to excise a piece of it in the process of, say, removing a cancerous tumor, then I'll often have a pretty good idea of some specific consequences that will result from removing that particular piece."

She paused, glancing at Bonnie, who nodded her understanding, and then she continued."But much of the brain's functioning is still _terra__ incognita._ Things like intelligence and memory and personality and 'what makes a person a person' and all that stuff…" She shook her head, shrugging at the same time. "Well, long-term memory, once encoded by other parts of the brain, generally gets shoved into either of the two frontal or temporal lobes or into the cerebellum for storage, depending on what kind of memory it is. And…we'll be keeping the cerebellum, and the part of the left hemisphere of the cerebrum that I'm looking at possibly saving is… Well, most of it is part of the left temporal lobe, and some of it is a bit of the frontal lobe."

"So you're saying…?" Bonnie hesitantly prompted after Jessica's voice trailed off.

Jessica sighed, throwing her hands up in the air in frustration.

"I don't know, really. Instead of totally replacing this poor boy's brain with technology, what I'm proposing now is essentially hijacking it instead, retaining a good portion of the original brain but allowing technology to take over its higher functions. That will have consequences. Good ones...and possibly bad ones."

"Such as?" Bonnie prompted.

Jessica sighed as she answered, "Well, on the good side of the tally sheet, we're leaving the cerebellum intact. Among other things, it stores knowledge of how to do oft-repeated learned voluntary tasks so that they can be done without having to think about the mechanics of doing them. Things like crawling, walking, and running. Or writing with a pen. Or balancing while riding a bicycle. That sort of thing. So, assuming that all this works as we're hoping and he can access all this stuff, Kitt won't have to learn how to do those things. It'll already be there."

"And on the bad side of the tally sheet?" Bonnie asked warily.

Jessica shook her head uncertainly as she answered, "The salvaged cerebral tissue. Normally I'd say that it would be utterly useless without the rest of the brain, far too damaged and disconnected to do any good whatsoever…but given the scenario here…" She sighed, gathering scattered thoughts, and finished, "I _guess_ what I'm saying is that _if_ the salvaged tissue can be put to use, then along with everything else, it's at least theoretically possible that Kitt may have to deal with some very confused and fragmented bits and pieces of the…the original tenant. Maybe. Or maybe not. I don't really know, to be perfectly honest. From a purely scientific point of view, it'll be…very interesting to see what happens. Or what doesn't happen, as the case may be."

Bonnie swallowed uncertainly. She turned and took a few steps away so that she could settle herself on the edge of her workstation. The series of movements also gave her a moment to think.

Once she'd settled herself, she said quietly, "That could be a problem."

Jessica nodded in agreement and then said, "Yes, it could be. On the other hand, if we _don__'__t_ do it this way, then you and Team Nerd are back to having a boatload of software to engineer."

Bonnie frowned, agreeing, as she added, "And that would require time that Kitt just doesn't have anymore, seeing what happened tonight. And…there may not be any kind of…problem, anyway," she finished, her tone indicating that it was half statement and half hopeful question.

Jessica shrugged as she folded her arms over her chest and leaned back against the workbench that was behind her again after her fit of pacing.

"Possibly not," she agreed. "Maybe even _probably_ not. I suppose it'll all depend on what's stored within any tissue that I can salvage _and_ whether or not Kitt will be able to access and use it at all _and_ whether or not any…data…that might be stored there will be recoverable and at all coherent _if_ anything is stored there at all. Much of the brain's storage capacity is never used, so…" Her words trailed off into another shrug.

Bonnie wrinkled her nose as she considered Jessica's words.

"That's a lot of conditional ifs, mights, and ands," she decided quietly.

Jessica nodded her agreement and, her gaze turning so that it became inwardly focused, she quietly answered, almost more to herself than to Bonnie, "And each of them _does_ lower the statistical probability of any such problems occurring."

Watching Jessica think, Bonnie found herself smiling and chuckling softly, which nudged Jessica out of her temporary, probability-weighing reverie.

Frowning up at Bonnie, Jessica asked, "What?"

"You…just sound like Kitt sometimes," Bonnie answered with a shrug. "Well, if he came from Alabammy, that is," she added with a smile as she momentarily and teasingly borrowed some of Jessica's drawl.

Jessica snorted, smiled ruefully, and said, "I'll take that as a compliment."

Bonnie nodded firmly as she replied, "As you should." After a pause, she took a deep breath and then released it as she added, "This could work."

"It _will_ work," Jessica confidently countered.

"And now that I think about it," Bonnie said, blinking owlishly, "a lot of the work is already done. It was controlling the autonomic functions that was stumbling us more than anything else was. But if we don't have to worry about that…"

"Then y'all've got almost everything else under control already," Jessica finished. "I know," she added with a grin.

"We need to design the interface," Bonnie said. "Which is no small task," she added with a sigh.

"That's true," Jessica agreed. "But since y'all're a miracle worker and you've got a whole team of really big brains to pick and work with, it'll happen." Bonnie grimaced at the confidence in Jessica's words while Jessica added, "And y'all can pick _my_ brain as much as y'all need to, of course. And… Can I use that thing?" she asked suddenly, jerking her chin distastefully at an empty computer workstation in the corner of the room.

Bonnie frowned at the abrupt change of subject, and her eyes followed Jessica's gesture. Then she blinked in surprise as she responded, "You _want_ to use a computer?"

Jessica smirked and answered, "Just this once. If I may."

"Well, sure," Bonnie said with a shrug. "But why?"

Jessica answered, narrowing her eyes thoughtfully, as she settled herself into the very comfortable chair in front of the workstation, "There's been some recent research into the microstructure of the _corpus__ callosum _and its connections, done by a friend of mine who's working in research over at Johns Hopkins now. I want to see if I can access the _New England Journal of Medicine_'s database and then pull up his journal articles on this damned thing so that I can have a closer look at them. If I can't, I can to go to the hospital and grab some hard copies, but this would be much faster. I can also give him a call when the hour is a little saner. But in any case, if y'all can filter out all the 'brain surgeon,' I'm sure that his work'll help y'all to do whatever it is that y'all need to do to design the interface. And _I_ should probably review the hell out of all of it before I start indiscriminately slicing and dicing like an out-of-control food processor."

"Sounds good to me," Bonnie said with a snort and a smile as she went off to confer with the members of Team Nerd who were working at 4AM and Jessica settled in to exercise her meager computer skills.

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><p><em><strong>Review replies!<strong>_

_**BlueBassist:** "Eavesdropping" is perfectly OK. It's why I like to reply to reviews "publicly," in fact. And...Aw, I kinda like RC, actually. I think the problem is that the show's general structure is narratively tight. It really doesn't allow for having a huge cast of characters. Heck, they had enough trouble giving Bonnie something to do. The show's structure couldn't tolerate another character at all so, really, I really don't understand why they decided to add one in the first place, unless they were trying to be more "multi-cultural." *shrugs* Thankfully, in fanfic, we can be less restrained. :) As for Super Pursuit. Bleagh. I suppose that Kitt had to have his yearly makeover because it was sort of tradition but…Why'd they have to pick that? *laughs*_

_**Jalaperilo:** Ah, poor Kitt. The things I do to him. When he goes downhill, he goes **downhill. *laughs***_

_I sometimes have the "brain won't shut down" problem, too. When that happens, it results in 48-hour writing jags. I used to be able to go for 72 – more, even, if I popped some Vivarin or something a little less *ahem* legal – when I was younger, but…Age has its effects, I'm afraid. *sigh* But yeah, middle-of-the-night inspiration seems to be more my thing, waking up with a character or five going "Psssst! Hello? Is this mic on?" in my brain._

_Oh, and if you want to hear Jessica's accent, watch the movie _Fried Green Tomatoes_. It's a good movie, and the Alabama accent's all over the place in it. *laughs*_


	9. Chapter 9

_This is just a wee thing. Actually, it's meant to be attached to a second part, full o' Bonnie and Kitt…but I felt a need to mess with it a bit before posting it up, so it'll probably be up tomorrow or the next day, assuming that I have time to finish the messing. (I DO have to do some for-pay work, after all ;) ). But I thought I'd post this up in the meantime, to tide you over. :)_

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><p>"So there it is," Jessica said quietly, staring at the alien-looking chunk of technology in front of her.<p>

"Yep, there it is," Bonnie confirmed. "And there's no _way_ we could have finished it without Dr. Grayson's help, especially not in…what? Thirty-two hours?" she added. "Thank you for putting me in touch with him. He was very helpful, and he didn't ask too many awkward questions that I wasn't at liberty to answer."

"Carl's a _real_ nice guy," Jessica said with a smiling nod. "We were in med school together, and he was one of the few who took me seriously. And he's brilliant. I consult with him often. I wish he didn't live three thousand miles away, really. Oh, and he's single, too," she added pointedly.

Bonnie rolled her eyes and muttered, "Not you, too."

"Too?" Jessica echoed, lifting her eyebrows innocently.

"Practically every married person I know is always trying to bring me into the married fold," Bonnie answered, her tone long-suffering. "How long have you been married, anyway?" she asked, trying to deflect the conversation away from herself.

Jessica smiled happily as she answered, "On June 23rd, it'll be ten years."

Bonnie blinked, surprised.

"That's a long time," she commented.

Jessica shrugged as she answered, "Not really. My parents have been married for forty-nine years and Phillip's were married for fifty-two years when his papa died last year. Ten years seems to have gone by like _that_," she said, snapping her fingers. "People just throw away marriages too easily nowadays," she offhandedly opined as she leaned in closer to the hardware that she was looking at, warily eyeing the interface Bonnie had designed.

"I suppose they do," Bonnie murmured.

"So what've you got against it?" Jessica asked curiously.

"Against marriage? Nothing," Bonnie insisted. Too loudly, in Jessica's estimation; she looked at Bonnie with an inquisitively raised eyebrow. "I'm just…busy," Bonnie added defensively, noticing the look on Jessica's face. "I don't have the time for dating and all that stuff."

"Oh, bull," Jessica exasperatedly shot back. "Y'all're just waiting for a certain someone to come to his senses."

"Jess!" Bonnie protested.

"Don't even _think_ that I haven't noticed the sparkage," Jessica teased, sing-song and with a dangerously knowing grin. "Why d'y'all think I don't stand between the two of you? Might get myself fried."

Jessica's grin widened when Bonnie, bless her heart, blushed prettily. Jessica snickered in response.

"Can we…get off this subject, please?" Bonnie weakly requested.

Jessica sighed.

"Fine. I'll let y'all off the hook…for now," Jessica warned. She went back to regarding the hardware in front of her, frowning at it doubtfully. "You know," she said, "the more I look at this sucker….the more I'm thinking that I won't be able to install it all by myself." She gave Bonnie a significant look.

"Oh hell, no!" Bonnie immediately protested. "Blood and I…We don't get along."

Jessica smiled and answered brightly, "Well, fortunately for you, my friend, there's actually relatively little blood involved in brain surgery. In fact, if there's a lot of it, that's a pretty good indication that you've screwed something up real good and that you'd better be giving your malpractice defense lawyer a call when you get out of the OR."

Bonnie paled.

"But…I nearly passed out when I had to dissect a frog in high school," Bonnie further protested. "I can talk you through it," she insisted.

Jessica shook her head, eyeing the tiny, almost microscopic fibers of the interface, each meant to be spliced to specific individual clusters of neurons that made up the _corpus __callosum_.

"Ohhhhh, I don't think so," she said doubtfully. "I'm good, but I'm not _that_ good."

Bonnie gaped at her like a landed fish.

"Can we go back to talking about Michael now?" she asked weakly.

Jessica giggled delightedly.

"Nice try," she said. "C'mon, Bon," she wheedled when Bonnie only continued to gape at her. "Y'all can do this. You don't have to be there for the slicing up and stuff, which'll definitely be the grossest part. And I'll make sure there's a good supply of barf bags on hand. And…It's for Kitt."

"Oh, God," Bonnie murmured, closing her eyes in surrender. "You had to say that, didn't you?"

Jessica shrugged and said, "Well, I gotta go with what works, right?"

Bonnie smirked at her as she sighed, "I'll think about it."

Jessica grimaced and answered, very seriously, "Well, it's not like y'all have much time to think, you know."

"That's true," Bonnie quietly acknowledged. "Did you talk to Kitt today?" she asked.

Jessica nodded.

"Just before I came here," she said softly. "As much as it's possible to talk to him now, anyway. Poor guy."

"Yeah," Bonnie acknowledged, her eyes shadowing with melancholy and not a little fear. "I hope we're not too late. We'll be transferring him into a temporary, portable CPU as soon as it's ready, which should be any minute now. Once that's done…Well, then you're on, kid."

Jessica nodded.

"I'll call in the surgical team," she said. "How long can he stay in the temporary CPU?"

Bonnie shrugged and answered, "As long as he needs to stay in there, theoretically. But I'd _rather_ it not be very long. Once he's in there, away from the subroutine, he should be able to hibernate, which will make things easier on him, but still… It won't be…comfortable for him, being completely cut off from everything. I don't want him to have to endure that for long."

Jessica nodded. She knew that Kitt was having enough trouble with the limited interactive capabilities that he currently had as it was. To be completely cut off…She wasn't willing to do that to him for any extended period of time, either.

Jessica nodded decisively and said, "We can be ready in six hours. Maybe a bit less, if necessary."

"Six hours should be fine," Bonnie answered. "If all goes well, it'll take a couple of hours to move him to the temp CPU, anyway. And that's _assuming_ that the subroutine isn't…troublesome. If it is…Well, the move will take longer, at the very least."

Jessica frowned and asked, "Do you think that it will be troublesome?"

"I really won't know until we start the process of moving him," Bonnie answered with another shrug. "It wouldn't surprise me if it causes some sort of trouble. But on the plus side, I guess, we're not moving everything, not even everything that we'd _like_ to move, and what we _are_ moving isn't the stuff that the subroutine seems to be interested in. So maybe we'll be lucky, and it won't make a fuss at all."

Jessica frowned.

"Why aren't you moving everything that you'd like to move?" she asked curiously.

"Storage space," Bonnie answered. "There just isn't as much in there," she said, gesturing at the new hardware. "And we need to leave a good amount of space free, of course. So…Well, for instance, Kitt can speak a hundred-and-some languages, but now he's going to be stuck with just English. I know it'll piss him off not to have everything he's used to having…but it can't be helped. There just isn't room for everything."

"So he'll be Kitt Lite," Jessica quipped.

"Something like that, yes," Bonnie answered with a chuckle.

And then the lab's phone rang. Bonnie went to it, answered it, exchanged a few words with the caller, and then hung up.

She turned back to Jessica and said solemnly, "They're ready for me."

Jessica smiled at her encouragingly and said, "Good luck."

Bonnie smiled back and answered, "You, too." And then she left the lab, heading for the garage.

* * *

><p><em>For those who might be concerned; Don't worry, there's no intense, descriptive brain surgery scene in this story. I did watch some videos of brain surgery for research purposes (and because I think it's fascinating, personally, and I'm not squeamish.) But…it'd be unnecessary for this, I think. You'll just have to use your imaginations. *snicker*<em>

_Annnnd…Review replies next time. I'm a bit pressed for time today. :)_


	10. Chapter 10

_ARGH! Sorry for the delay on this, folks. I wanted to rework a bit of the first part of this chapter before I posted it. And then I got bogged down in work stuff. And then I caught myself a nasty flu, high fever and all. I still have the remnants of it, although at least the fever is gone, but everything's getting better now. I would probably be **all** better by now, if not for having to work while sick. The perils of self-employment; you can't call in sick and the deadlines don't just go away because your body has suddenly been invaded by a pillaging and plundering horde of viruses. It's not like my work is at all physically active or anything, but having to do it does take time away from, say, drugging myself to the eyeballs and then sleeping all day, which would mean getting better faster. :p_

_Ah well. I'm on the mend. And I was able to do the bit of reworking that I wanted to do to this, so…here it is. The final "pre-transfer" chapter. I hope it's somewhat worth the wait. I suspect not, but…Oh well. Blame it on the &$#!ing 'flu virus. :)_

* * *

><p>Once she made certain that all of the connections were properly in place, Bonnie settled herself into Kitt's driver's seat, closing the door behind her. She did so very gently. She knew, intellectually, that it made no difference whatsoever to Kitt if the door was slammed violently or closed gently; he didn't feel sensations like physical pain or discomfort. But for the moment, she wasn't thinking so much with the intellectual part of her brain, and she felt a need to be gentle.<p>

She pulled in a deep breath, and then let it out in a long sigh. Turning in her seat, she set the portable computer she'd brought with her on the passenger seat and then leaned down to connect it with a cable to a free COM port on the underside of the car's dashboard. She'd use the computer to initiate and then monitor the transfer process but also to communicate with Kitt. Talking was difficult and laborious for Kitt now and processing auditory input was almost as difficult. Communicating with him in text was much faster and, more importantly, it was much easier on Kitt.

Sighing again, Bonnie typed in, _Kitt?_

Almost immediately, the words, _I__'__m__ still __here_, appeared on the screen and Bonnie smiled.

_We__'__re__ ready__ to__ start__ the__ transfer_, Bonnie typed at Kitt. _Are__ you__ ready?_

_Not __really,_ Kitt answered, _but__ I__ suppose__ I __have__ no__ choice__ in __the __matter__ now._

_No,__ I__ suppose__ not, _Bonnie responded, frowning as she typed. _It__'__ll__ be__ OK,__ Kitt,_ she added, attempting to be reassuring, although doing so in text wasn't exactly easy.

_Will __it?_ Kitt immediately answered, and somehow the fear behind the words clearly conveyed itself to Bonnie.

It didn't surprise her that she could "read" Kitt so well. He was, at least in part, her creation. He had certainly developed since his "birth" in ways that hadn't been her doing and that had been entirely beyond her control, but that was what kids did. They were birthed and from then on, they could be guided here and there as they grew and learned, but in the end, _nothing_ could prevent them from becoming the person that they were meant to be. And it had been much the same with Kitt. Still, Bonnie had brought him into the world, and she had been with him his entire life apart from a sabbatical to write her dissertation. She'd spent long hours in conversations with him that ran the entire gamut from completely inconsequential to lightly joking to profoundly serious and philosophical. After all of that, she didn't need to hear Kitt's voice to know what he was thinking and what he was feeling.

_Yes,__it__ will_, she typed back at Kitt and then said, aloud, "It _will_," so that Kitt would hear the conviction in her voice.

_You__ don__'__t__ know __that__ for __certain,_ Kitt countered after a moment.

Bonnie sighed as she answered, _No,__ nothing __is__ ever __certain, __Kitt.__ You__ know__ that.__ But__ I__ do __have__ confidence__ in __myself__ and__ in __my __team.__ And__ I __have__ confidence__ in __you, __of__ course._

_Well, __that __makes __one __of__ us,_ Kitt replied, and Bonnie could almost hear the wryly self-deprecating tone that she knew his voice would have had had he spoken the words.

_You__'__ll__ be__ OK,_ she typed back at Kitt. And she believed it, truly she did. She knew that he was going to have a tough road ahead of him, and that there would be bumps along it, probably some huge ones that none of them could anticipate until he actually ran afoul of them. But Bonnie also knew that Kitt was a tough cookie and that his adaptive and learning capabilities were virtually endless. She'd made them that way, after all. It was just that Kitt was impatient, and he was likely to push himself too hard too fast. More than that, he would expect too much of himself and so make things much more difficult and frustrating for himself.

_I__ hope__ so,_ Kitt was answering, meanwhile.

_I __know__ so,_ Bonnie answered_.__ Because__ above__ all,__ I__ have __complete__ confidence__ in__ Jessica._

_As __do__ I,_ Kitt admitted after a thoughtful pause. _But__ perhaps__ we__'__re__ jumping __the__ gun.__ You__ said __yourself__ that __you__ can__'__t __test__ the__ new __hardware __until __it__'__s__ actually__ in__ place.__ If__ it __doesn__'__t __work __at__ all,__ what__ then?_

_If__ it__ doesn__'__t __work_, Bonnie typed, swallowing uncertainly at the same time, _then_ _we __put__ you __in__ a__ mainframe.__ We__'__re__ building __one,__ just __in__ case.__ You__ know __that__'__s __always__ been __Plan__ B__ and,__ besides,__ it__ might __be__ handy__ to __have__ in__ the__ future __if__ something__ else__ ever __happens__ to __you._

_I__ see,_ Kitt answered, and Bonnie could easily detect his unease. _I can almost hear Devon's complaints about the bills,_ he added.

Bonnie grinned and answered, _I haven't heard any yet. But then, most of the bills haven't come in yet._

_ And when they do, we'll hear ALL about it,_ Kitt surmised. There was a pause, and then, _So __I__ sit__ in __an __isolated __mainframe__ until...__what? _appeared on the screen._  
><em>

Bonnie scowled and answered, _You __sit __in __a __mainframe__ or, __preferably, __in __that __human __body __up __there __until __I __find __whoever __did__ this __to __you __and__ then __kill__ them__ in__ some __slow, __horrible __fashion._

_No!_ Kitt immediately protested._ No,__ I __don__'__t __want __you __to __kill __them. __I __don__'__t __want __that __on __my__ conscience.__ Or __on __yours, __for __that __matter. __Or __on __Michael__'__s,__ since __I __know__ he__'__d __be __right __there __with __you._

Bonnie smiled at Kitt's answer and then typed,_ All __right, __all __right. __I__ won__'__t __kill __them.__ But __I__ make __no __promises __about __severe __maiming._

_Severe__ maiming __would __be __acceptable, _Kitt decided, and Bonnie chuckled. _In__ fact,_ Kitt added, _I__'__d__ expect __no __less __of__ the __mama __bear._The affection behind the words was unmistakable, at least to Bonnie.

_You__ know __it,_ Bonnie answered, reaching out to pat the dashboard with affection equal to Kitt's. _Why __do __you __think __I__'__ve __been __so __hard __on __Michael __all __these __years?_

_Indeed, _Kitt answered. _In __fact, __now__ that __you __mention __maiming,__ it__'__s __amazing__ to __me__ that __you __haven__'__t __deprived __him__ of __certain __body __parts __of __which__ he __happens __to __be __very __fond._

Bonnie chuckled, and answered,_ After __seeing __the __condition __he__'__s __brought __you __back __in__ on __numerous__ occasions, __don__'__t __think __that__ I__ haven__'__t __been __sorely __tempted._

_I __know __that __you __have __been,_ Kitt answered. _And __I __admire __your __restraint. __And__ I __thank__ you __for __it.__ Because__ otherwise,__ I__'__d __be __the__ one __to __have __to __listen __to __all __the __complaining __after __the __maiming._

Bonnie chuckled again at that, and then both were "quiet" for a moment. Then: _Bonnie__…__Speaking__ of __Michael, __among __other __things__… __In__ case __something__ happens__ to __me __and __I__'__m__ lost __or __incapacitated, __I__ want __you __to __know__ some __things._

_Kitt,__ nothing__'__s__ going __to __happen __to __you, _Bonnie answered, her fingers hitting the computer's keys with much more force than necessary, conveying her determination. _You__'__re __not __going __to __be __lost. __I__ won__'__t __allow__ it._

_I__ know __that __you__'__ll __do __everything __in__ your __power __to __prevent__ it, __of __course__…__but __as __I__ said, __you __can__'__t know that __for __certain,_ Kitt insisted. _Even __if __everything __goes __exactly __as __planned, __I __know __that __I __will __have __much a__djusting__ to __do, __and __I__'__m__ still __not __particularly __confident__ that __I__'__ll __be__ able __to __do __it. __And__ if __everything__ doesn__'__t __go __as __planned,__ then__…__I__ need __to __tell __you __this,__Bonnie. __Just __in __case.__Please._

Bonnie swallowed, fought back tears that wanted to form in her eyes, and then typed, _All__ right, __then.__ Go__ ahead._

_Most __importantly, _Kitt began, _I__ want __you __to __know__ that __even __if __you __didn__'__t __have __those __mama __bear __tendencies,__ you __are __still __the __closest__ thing __that __I__ have __to __a __mother, __and __that __I __love __you._

Bonnie smiled affectionately. She'd more or less known that he felt that way, even back when he had firmly and loudly insisted that he didn't have feelings. But that didn't mean that she didn't feel a huge wave of warm fuzzies anyway, because he'd never actually _said_ the words before. Still smiling, she typed back,_ I __love __you, __too, __sweetheart._

_And,_ Kitt continued, _you__ are __one __of __the __two __most __important __people __in __the __world __to __me. __I __think__ you __know __who __the __other __one __is._

_I__'__ve __got __a __pretty __good__ idea, __yes, _Bonnie typed back, smiling again.

_And__ if __all __of __this __goes __straight__ to __hell,_ Kitt finished, _I __know__ that __both __you__ and__ Michael __will __be __upset._

"_Upset_?" Bonnie responded, disbelievingly, aloud. Shaking her head, she typed, _More__ like__ "__utterly __destroyed,__" __Kitt._

_Be__ that __as __it __may, _Kitt conceded_,__ I __want__…__ That __is, __it __would __make __me__ happier, __going __into __all __of__ this, __if __I __could __be certain __that __if __something __catastrophic __should__ happen __to __me, __you__'__ll __be __there __for __each __other. __I__ tried __to __talk __to __Michael__ about__ this __last __night, __but __he__ doesn__'__t __want __to __hear __it, __and __he __certainly __won__'__t __talk__ about__ it._

_He__'__s__ afraid, _Bonnie said,_ and __that__'__s __not __an __emotion __he__'__s __used __to __dealing __with._

_No,__ it __isn__'__t, _Kitt answered. _He__ doesn__'__t__ know __how__ to __deal __with__ it, __really, __so __he __tends __to __avoid __it __and__ deny __it __instead. __Nevertheless,__ the __possibilities __that __do __exist, __however __remotely, __must__ be __acknowledged __whether __he __wants __to __acknowledge __them__ or __not._

_I__ suppose __they __do, _Bonnie agreed.

_And __I __know __that __you __two__ don__'__t __always__ see __eye-to-eye,_Kitt continued,_ but__…__ You __will __need __each__ other. __Or__ at __least, __I__ know __that __Michael __will __need_ _YOU.__ Because __without __me, __he __has __no __one __else. __You __have __a__ life, __friends__ and__ family __and __colleagues, __outside __of __all __of __this. __Michael __doesn__'__t,__ and__ that __worries __me. __Above __all, __I__ don__'__t __want __him__ to __do __anything __stupid, __if__ something __should __happen __to __me._

Bonnie swallowed, tears welling in her eyes again, prompted by the thought of losing Kitt but perhaps even more by imagining what such a loss would do to Michael. Because Kitt was right: Michael's whole world had become Kitt and the work that they did together. He'd lost everything else when Michael Long had died and Michael Knight had risen phoenix-like from the ashes. So without Kitt, Michael's world would be gone, just as Kitt's would be gone if the situation were reversed and it was Michael who was facing the possibility of oblivion.

She'd often wondered if Wilton Knight had had any real idea of what he'd been doing when he'd linked Michael's and Kitt's fates so intimately. She'd wondered if he'd consciously engineered it such that neither had a purpose without the other or if that was simply how things had evolved, unforeseen, because that was how, also unforeseen, Kitt himself had evolved. She deeply suspected that Wilton hadn't really given it all that much thought beyond the initial goal of the project. And it was obvious to Bonnie that Wilton had always seen Kitt as a mere tool, not as a person, a thinking individual. It was obvious that he had seen Kitt as a tool that could be replaced if necessary and, indeed, whenever necessary, as often as necessary. His attitude had grated on Bonnie fiercely, but she'd shoved the resentment aside and focused on her work, only to have the resentment resurface with a vengeance when Michael had, at least initially, seen Kitt in exactly the same way that Wilton had. Fortunately, Michael had changed his tune rather quickly because he'd had the opportunity to do so. Wilton hadn't had that opportunity; he'd died a few days after Kitt had been transferred to the car and brought online there. If only he'd lived to see what Kitt had become…

Then again, Bonnie thought with a small, wry smile, Wilton Knight very well might have been _appalled_ by what Kitt had become.

Bonnie shook herself then. She took a few moments to force back the tears that were still swimming in her eyes so that she could clearly see the screen in front of her. And then she answered, _I __promise __you __that __if __the __worst __happens, __I__'__ll __be __there __for __Michael, __and __that __if __it__'__s __at __all __within __my __power __to __prevent__ it, __I __won__'__t __let __him __do __anything__ stupid. __That __is, __I__'__ll __be __there __if __he__'__ll __let __me__ be __there. __You __know__ how__ he __is._

_I__ do, __yes, _Kitt answered. _I __know __him__ and __how __he __is __all __too__ well, __in __fact. __That__'__s __why __I __know __that __he__ will __let __you,__ specifically, __be __there __when __he __wouldn__'__t__ let __anyone__ else __be. __And __even __then, __he __might __put __up __a__ good __fight __at __first. __But __eventually,__ he__'__ll __cave. __He __cares __about __you, __you__ know._

_I__ know,_ Bonnie answered simply.

_And __he __really __isn__'__t __the __horrible, __womanizing__ lecher __that __you __think __he __is,_ Kitt added.

_I__'__ve __come __to __realize __that __over __the__ years_, _yes,_ Bonnie answered, smiling slightly.

_And__ even __if __everything __goes __precisely __according __to __plan __and __nothing __horrible __happens __to __me __at __all, _Kitt continued,_ I__'__d __like __nothing__ better __than __to __see __you __two__— _

"Oh, don't _you_ start!" Bonnie protested aloud, as she saw the direction of the words flowing across the screen in front of her. "God!" she groused. "First Jessica, now you. I suppose Devon will be next," she complained.

_I__'__m__ just __saying,_ Kitt responded, defensively, on the screen. _But __I__'__ll__ say __no __more, __I __promise,_ he added. _I __just __wanted __you __to __know._

_ Just__ in __case? _Bonnie typed, teasing.

_ Just__ in __case, _Kitt confirmed. There was a pause, and then he added, _And __now __I __suppose __we__ should __get __on __with __the __task __at__ hand._

Bonnie nodded, back to business.

_I __suppose __we __should,_ she typed. _Are __you__ ready?_

_ No,_ Kitt answered honestly,_ but __I __suppose__ that __stalling __and __fretting __only __makes __things__ worse._

Bonnie smiled and answered,_ Sometimes.__ Sometimes __it__'__s __best __to __just __get __a__ distasteful __task__ over __and __done __with. __But __this __is __only __temporary,__ you __know. __We__'__ll__ get __you __moved __and __then__…_

_ And __then __the __REALLY__ distasteful __part __begins, _Kitt finished, the resignation behind the typed words blatantly obvious to Bonnie.

She smiled and answered, _That__ depends __on __your __point __of __view, __sweetheart. __Ready?__ And __don__'__t __say __no._

_I__'__m__ as __ready __as __I__'__ll __ever __be, _Kitt answered._ See __you __on __the __other __side, __as__ they __say. __At __least, __I__ hope __I __will._

_You__ WILL,_ Bonnie confidently replied. _I __promise,_she added.

And then she typed a few commands into the computer, and the transfer process began…

* * *

><p>"I wasn't conned into doing this, Stephen," Jessica indignantly insisted into the phone. "I'm doing this to save a person's life."<p>

"You mean to save a computer's life. Such as a fancy computer with delusions of grandeur can have a life, that is," Dr. Stephen Lane, on the other side of the phone conversation, retorted. He'd been the surgeon to whom, according to Devon, Michael had spoken the day before he'd approached Jessica. And, unfortunately, Jessica knew him all too well.

"No, Stephen," Jessica answered patiently, trying to swallow her irritation. "To save a _person__'__s _life. If you'd opened up your mind by just a little _teeny_ crack for _once_ in your life and hadn't just dismissed this whole thing out of hand – as you _always_ do when it comes to the tough cases – then _maybe_ you might have come to understand that."

Dr. Lane snorted as he answered, "You know, Mac, I realize that the usual social graces aren't exactly your forte. But here's a hint, for future reference: When you're asking for someone's help, it's usually considered good form _not_ to insult them."

"I'm not insulting you," Jessica answered reasonably, shrugging even though her shrug couldn't be seen over the phone, "I'm merely speaking the truth, and you know it. You're a pragmatist, Stephen, and you don't take on battles that you don't think you can win. _Everyone_ this side of the Mississippi – and maybe even on the other side of it, too, for all I know – knows that. And it drives me, in particular, nuts. But when push comes to shove you're a damned good surgeon."

The other surgeon was quiet for a moment, surprised, before he drawled, "Why, Mac, darling. I didn't know you cared."

Jessica snorted and answered, "Well, I'm a pragmatist, too, in one or two ways. Look…I know this is short notice. And I know that we're sort of…rivals and all."

"Us?" Dr. Lane sarcastically interjected. "No!"

"And I know it's Sunday," Jessica continued, heedless, "so I'm probably threatening your precious tee time and—"

Dr. Lane laughed and answered, "Actually, you're not. Two of my foursome are down with that 'flu that's been going around. So, we canceled for today."

"Well, then, since you don't have anything _better_ to do…" Jessica sniped sarcastically. She paused, bit back the rest of the acid reply she'd intended to spew, swallowed her pride, and finished quietly, "Like I said, I need help with the initial step of this thing, Stephen. And…I can't think of anyone I'd rather have in there with me."

Dr. Lane made a choking noise.

"Jesus, the Great and Powerful Dr. Mac is admitting that she needs _my_ help? All right, who is this, really, and what planet are you invading from?"

Jessica's scowl sharpened her voice as she answered, "If you don't want to help, Stephen, that's fine. I'll just call…Mullen."

"Mullen?" Dr. Lane echoed disbelievingly. "They talked to _Mullen_?"

"Apparently so," Jessica answered, amused. "He does have a lot of experience, you know."

"Yes, of course," Lane agreed. "But only because he's about a hundred-and-ten years old and should have retired thirty years ago. I'm surprised he doesn't still do therapeutic trepanning to release evil spirits. I wouldn't trust him to clip an aneurysm, much less..."

Despite herself, Jessica laughed.

"Nevertheless," she said, "he is my other option. So, it's you, him, or I fly this puppy solo, and…I'd really rather not do that."

Lane sighed, was quiet for a moment, and then he said, "All right, Mac. How about if I come over, see what you've got, and—"

"There's no time for that," Jessica interrupted. Noticing movement out of the corner of her eye, she turned her head to see Michael hovering in the doorway arch of the sitting room she was using to make the calls that she needed to make. He was watching her curiously, and she beckoned him inside. To Lane, she said firmly, in a tone that brooked no argument, "I need a yes or a no here. And I need it right now."

Lane sighed, deliberated for a moment, and then he said, "All right. Fine. I'll do it if only to see the Great and Powerful Dr. Mac fall flat on her tiny little ass."

Jessica smiled and answered, "Well, we'll just see about that, won't we?"

"I'll be right over. Are you at your office? The hospital?"

"Neither," Jessica answered. "I'm pretty close to your grand palace, actually," she drawled, and rattled off the FLAG mansion's address.

Lane made a perplexed noise but asked no further questions as he said, "I can be there in…forty-five minutes."

Jessica nodded, said, "I'll tell the front gate to expect you," and then hung up the phone and flopped bonelessly back into the arms of the comfortably padded wingback chair she was sitting in, letting out a deeply irritated noise as she did so.

Michael, who'd sat himself in the matching chair across the width of a coffee table from her, asked curiously, "What was that all about?"

"That," Jessica answered wearily, "was Stephen Lane. One of the biggest pains in my ass. But…I need his help on this."

The name was vaguely, naggingly familiar to Michael, and he frowned as he answered, "You do?"

Jessica nodded and explained, "The…dissection I'll have to do prior to installing Kitt's hardware is some pretty delicate stuff. It occurred to me that I didn't want to do it all by myself. I wish it had occurred to me _sooner_, but…" Her voice trailed off with a shrug.

"He's one of the other surgeons I spoke to," Michael said, still frowning as he finally placed the name.

"Yeah," Jessica replied. "And if I'd known y'all and known about all of this then, I'd've told you not to bother," she added with a wry smile. "He's as good a surgeon as I am," she explained with her usual lack of false modesty, "but…he doesn't take on cases that he's not reasonably sure that he can win. Might damage both his enormous ego and his nearly-spotless win/loss record, you see."

Michael scowled at that and said, somewhat scathingly, "Nice."

Jessica shrugged noncommittally as she answered, "It not that uncommon of an attitude. In fact, I'd say that it's more the _normal_ attitude amongst surgeons, especially those of us in high-risk fields like neurosurgery. As much as surgeons tend to dislike lawyers, we're really not that much different from them, you see." Michael smirked at that as Jessica added, "I'm just not normal."

"No!" Michael sarcastically protested.

Jessica snorted, stuck out her tongue at him, and then said, "No, not normal. But I'm also not _really_ a 'miracle worker;' it's just that I'll take cases that few others will, and I've had a fairly good success rate with them," she finished with a shrug.

Michael smiled at that as he slouched down in his chair, lacing his fingers over his belly.

"Well, as far as _I__'__m_ concerned," he said, "anyone who can poke around in someone else's _brain_ and not kill them in the process, is a miracle worker. So…you're just gonna have to deal with me thinking of you as one."

Jessica smiled at that, and answered, "I guess I can live with that." After a moment, when Michael didn't say anything but just sat there looking decidedly troubled, she asked, "Is there something wrong, Michael?"

"Wrong?" Michael echoed, frowning. "All _kinds_ of things are wrong, at the moment, Jess. So…specifically?"

Jessica snorted at that and said, "I meant, wrong with Kitt," she said. "Besides what I already know is wrong with him, that is. I thought y'all'd be…"

Michael shrugged and said with something of a pout, "Bonnie kicked me out." While Jessica laughed at that, Michael added, "But he's OK. I mean, the transfer is going OK. Or at least it was when I left a few minutes ago. But Bonnie kicked me out and asked me to do two things."

"Two things?" Jessica asked.

"Yep," Michael replied. "One was to find you and tell you that if things continue to go well, without incident, the transfer to the temporary CPU will be done in about an hour and a half."

Jessica nodded. "And the other?"

"The other was to get my ass into bed," Michael said with a snort. "You'd think she was my mother or something," he added in a mutter.

Jessica chuckled and said, "Well, I second her on that one, so I guess you have two mothers. I'm afraid y'all _do_ look like hell, honey."

Michael gave her a sour look and retorted, "Hey, you get about five hours of sleep in as many days and see how gorgeous _you_ look." He sighed then, rubbed at eyes that no longer felt like they had grains of sand in them but only because they felt like they had chunks of gravel in them instead, and conceded, "But yeah, I know she's right. And at the moment, there's no real need for me to be hanging around, because there's absolutely nothing I can do, so…" He shrugged and added, "But, I wanted to ask you… Do me one favor, Jess? Please?"

"Of course," Jessica answered seriously.

Michael bit his lip and then said, "If something…happens…something that looks serious, I mean…"

"I'll send for you right away," Jessica assured him very seriously and very sincerely. "I promise."

Michael gave her a sweet, melting little smile.

Jessica smiled in return and said, "Now get. I've got an incoming surgical team to brief, and y'all have an appointment with your bed. Doctor's orders," she added with an impish grin.

Michael smirked at that, then nodded and pushed himself up out of his chair…and then, unexpectedly, he paused. Jessica frowned up at him and was surprised when Michael bent down to plant a kiss on her cheek.

"Thanks, Jess," he said simply, quietly, but very sincerely.

"You're welcome," Jessica answered him equally sincerely and equally quietly. Then she poked his chest playfully with one finger and said, "Now get out of here before I haul out the weapons-grade sedatives and y'all end up spending the next twenty-four hours snoring and drooling over on that-there couch."

Michael turned his head to look at the indicated piece of antique and undoubtedly very expensive furniture and quipped, "That might be fun. If only because the drooling part would totally piss Devon off."

Jessica laughed delightedly at that but then smacked the back of her hand against his chest exasperatedly. "Get!" she demanded

"All right, all right," Michael surrendered. "I'm getting."

Jessica rolled her eyes and shook her head in amusement at Michael as she watched him leave, and then she settled in to wait for her surgical team to arrive.

* * *

><p><em>Review replies next time, I promise. For now, I'm going bad to bed. :p<em>


	11. Chapter 11

_So now here I am updating this story. :) For those of you who aren't reading my other little Knight Rider series, here's the deal about this thing: Unfortunately, my only existing complete copy of this story went POOF! in a blaze of power-surge-zapped external hard drive. So, I'm forced to reconstruct it. Fortunately, I do have a number of older versions of parts of the story on other computers that didn't get themselves zapped, plus I have a pretty good memory of the story stored in the not-yet-senile sectors of Brain's hard drive. So, the task is not as daunting as it might have been. Still, it is unfortunately a time-consuming task, and right now, my work that I'm actually paid for is keeping me very busy. (Which is, of course, a good thing. Income is nice.) The upshot is that I'm doing the best I can, all while recovering from very unexpected surgery, on top of everything else. That's a process that's taking a lot longer than I expected, probably because I'm not as young as I used to be. It really does all fall apart after you hit 45. *sigh*_

_But anyway, here's the next part of this story. The first little bit of it finally introduces, sort of, the villains, and it perhaps hints at their true purpose. Because, yes, there **are** villains in this story. *laughs* It just took 'em a while to show up…and now they'll promptly disappear again. For a little while, anyway. But in any case, here you go. I hope that this (and the rest of the story, as it arrives) will be worth the wait._

* * *

><p>"We aren't receiving telemetry anymore."<p>

Hearing the words, even as softly spoken as they had been, the older woman looked up sharply from what she had been doing and speared the younger woman who had spoken with an intensely expectant gaze. Her short, perfectly-coiffed hair was a bright, brittle silver, her face thin, with cavernous hollows under her cheekbones. Beneath a layer of artfully applied makeup, her skin was lined, pale, thin, and she was dressed in black, as always. Always funereal black, as if her entire world was dead and she was always, eternally, mourning it. Her body, beneath its swathe of stark, harsh black, was not as rounded and soft and womanly as it had once been. It was all hard, knife-sharp, forbidding angles of bone and sinew under a paper-thin veneer of skin.

She was wasting away, slowly. Her purpose, her sole mission in life now, was all that was sustaining her, was all that was still yoking her to the living world.

But her eyes… Her dark eyes were still very much alive. They blazed with a focused and manically determined fire that was not hot but that was instead intensely, hatefully cold. Cold enough to burn to a pile of frozen ashes anyone or anything they touched, if she so desired.

The younger woman shuddered slightly, reflexively, as that frigidly burning gaze leveled on her and then focused intensely on her as she hovered in the doorway almost nervously; she suddenly had no desire to be in the same room as the other woman. She added, almost hesitantly, "At least, we haven't received any telemetry in the past several hours."

"And that means?" the older woman sharply, crisply demanded, her voice as dangerous, as silkily, quietly powerful as it had ever been. Just like the blazing, determined, devouring eyes.

The younger woman bit her lip uncertainly and then quietly answered, "Most likely, it means that they've moved the AI out of the car."

And the older woman smiled, slowly and triumphantly, at the younger woman's words. It was a terrifying expression to behold because the smile didn't serve to warm or animate her face at all. It only made her eyes blaze more frigidly, making her seem colder still. More remote. Deader, even, as if the smile was not a smile at all but rather a death rictus that suddenly transformed her once-lovely face into a grinning skull. The younger woman had to fight not to cringe, not to back away, under its onslaught, but if the older woman noticed her growing unease at all, she obviously felt no need to acknowledge it.

"That is welcome news, my dear," the older woman answered approvingly. "You've done very well. I was beginning to have my doubts, so I'm relieved that you were right after all."

The compliment, and even the sudden flush of warmth in the older woman's voice that went along with it, did nothing to reassure the younger woman. If anything, it only increased her disquiet, which only increased further still as the older woman blinked, slowly. Her gaze abruptly lost its terrifying, piercing focus and then inevitably strayed, as always, to the photograph held in the ornate, silver-gilt frame that was sitting on the heavy, dark wood desk in front of her. She reached out to run long, skeletal fingers along the edges of the frame, the gesture a disconcertingly loving one.

The younger woman had never seen the image that the frame held, had never wanted to see it. Because she didn't need to see it. She knew what it was, and she knew exactly what it meant. She swallowed uneasily at the thought, and then she slipped away, undismissed and quickly, retreating down the same claustrophobic hallway through which she'd arrived.

But as she left, before she was completely out of earshot, she heard the older woman speak softly, and she knew that she was speaking to the photograph. Her voice was almost a coo, the kind of voice that one might use to soothe a squalling infant.

"It won't be long now," she said. "Not long at all."

* * *

><p>Michael experienced a flash of muzzy confusion when he awoke. The clock on the bedside table showed almost exactly the same time that he remembered it showing the last time he'd looked at it, just before he'd finally fallen asleep after a few hours spent tossing and turning despite overwhelming physical and mental exhaustion. He had been too tired to sleep, too keyed-up, drowning in too much in anxious anticipation of someone knocking on his door to deliver some very bad news to him. But that hadn't happened, and he'd finally managed to sleep.<p>

Now, as he awoke, the clock's hands hadn't seemed to have moved much, and the light level in the room seemed to be about the same as he remembered it being just before exhausted sleep had finally staked its claim on him. It was deeply puzzling. But then, as his brain started to clear out, a process that took a lot longer than it usually took, he realized what the difference was. He'd finally fallen asleep around 6:00PM; it was now 6:07AM the next morning. He'd slept like a rock, dreamlessly, perhaps even motionlessly, never once awakening during the evening and then through the entire night, so it was almost as if time had not passed at all, from his point of view.

Michael realized, dimly, that he'd likely awakened at all only because his bladder was suffering from the inevitable effects of the gallons of coffee that he'd drunk over the past few days. But he didn't want to get out of bed just yet. Instead, he rolled heavily onto his back, staring up at the ceiling while he swallowed rapidly a few times, trying to coax some moisture back into a mouth that felt like it was filled with cotton balls and that tasted like three-day-old coffee. At about the same time, he realized that his entire right arm was completely numb. He must have slept on it in a way that had cut off his circulation. He did not look forward to its eventual awakening. Grimacing at all of it, Michael threw off the bedcovers with the arm that wasn't numb, rolled out of bed, and then staggered to the bathroom.

He emerged from the bathroom about a half-hour later. He'd showered, awkwardly shaved and brushed his teeth with his not-tingling, not-half-numb left hand, and then dressed, and he felt marginally like himself. And then, without further thought, he headed downstairs, taking the grand staircase, once he reached it, three or four leaping steps at a time and then heading for a part of the mansion that he rarely visited because it was, in a word, creepy.

For one thing, he hated hospitals and hospital-like places, in general, but what contributed the most to the creep factor was that the room that he was approaching had been the site of his own transformation not so very long ago in the grand scheme of things. In retrospect, all of that had been one of the better things that had happened to him over the course of his lifetime to date…but there were still bad memories associated with that time. And that room. And now, if things weren't going well, he might be acquiring even more bad memories to add to his little collection.

Determinedly, Michael shoved such thoughts out of his mind; positive thoughts were what he needed to be thinking.

There was a comfortable little sitting area outside of another room, which had once been a large storage room, but that, years before, had been converted into a rather well equipped operating room. The waiting area was cheerfully lit by a large window set into one of its wall, and there was a television, a full bookshelf, and a number of mismatched end tables, chairs, and overstuffed sofas scattered around. They were comfortable chairs, even, seating that could be occupied for long stretches of time – even slept on – with no ill effects on the occupant. It occurred to Michael that actual hospitals would do well to learn from this little waiting area's example. He'd never understood why hospital waiting rooms tended to have the most uncomfortable chairs that it was humanly possible to find, as if someone deliberately went out on a quest for seating that only Torquemada could love.

And Michael wasn't at all surprised to find Devon Miles occupying one of the little sitting room's comfortable chairs. He _did_ wonder how long Devon had been sitting there, however, because he couldn't remember ever seeing the man looking quite so rumpled. His hair was mussed, as if he'd been running his hands through it often. There was grizzled stubble sprouting along his jaw line. He wasn't wearing a jacket. He wasn't wearing a _tie_. His shirt was still neatly tucked in, but its sleeves were unbuttoned and rolled up almost to his elbows, and its top two buttons were undone as well. He was sitting with his fingertips steepled against each other and then resting in turn against his chin, and he was staring meditatively out of the window. He appeared to be watching the sun slowly claw its way ever higher above the red-orange horizon, but Michael realized that he was actually millions of miles away when he was able to approach the chair that Devon was sitting in without the older man noticing. He even jumped as Michael gently laid a hand on his shoulder to get his attention.

"Michael," Devon said mildly, once he'd settled back into his skin. "You look much better," he observed as he blinked and squinted up at Michael.

"Sleep helps," Michael answered with a one-shouldered shrug. He gave Devon a meaningful look and said, "You oughta try it sometime."

Devon half-smiled, ruefully, and said, "Oh, I intend to. When this is all over."

Michael sighed and then nodded, understanding Devon's position all too well. If he hadn't already been awake for the better part of almost two weeks, only snatching relatively brief naps here and there whenever he could manage to do so during that entire stretch of time, he would have pulled a useless all-night vigil right alongside Devon.

"There's been no word?" Michael asked quietly as he busied himself with pulling over a particularly comfortable-looking chair, sitting it next to the one that Devon was occupying. He settled himself into the chair with a long sigh.

"Not so much as a peep," Devon answered somberly. "At least, not since Dr. Lane left, and that was…" He frowned as he noticed for the first time the sunrise that had bloomed outside. He blinked at it, his expression rendering surprise, and then he lifted his left arm with effort, as if it suddenly weighed a ton. Squinting at his watch, he finished, "Good Lord. That was almost eleven hours ago now. He said that his part in the process had gone well, so…"

Michael sighed again as Devon's voice trailed off into a shrug. He slumped farther into his chair, stretching his legs out in front of him and then lifting both arms in order to lace his fingers behind his head.

"Well," he said, "hopefully no news is good news."

"Hopefully so," Devon quietly agreed.

Michael opened his mouth to say something else, but that was about when the door that led into the operating room smacked open and a white-faced Bonnie staggered out. She stopped a few paces into the little waiting area, looked around dazedly, and then changed course and ended up heavily leaning against the nearest wall, as if it was suddenly the only thing in the world that could possibly keep her upright. Instantly, an alarmed Michael was leaping to his feet and approaching her. He wrapped a supportive arm around her waist and then led her insistently to the closest couch, gently settling her into it and then sitting down next to her. A second later, Bonnie managed to wax even paler than she already was, becoming even whiter than the scrubs that she wore. Sweat burst out on her face, her eyes flying wide, and then she suddenly leaned over to put her head down between her knees. Michael frowned, concerned, and reached out to run one hand up and down her back comfortingly, not knowing what else to do.

"You all right, Bon?" he asked her quietly, solicitously, a moment later, watching her take in huge, shuddering lungfuls of air.

"I will be," she managed to answer, weakly, raggedly.

"It must've been pretty…nasty?" Michael hesitantly surmised.

Bonnie took one last deep breath and then slowly, carefully, experimentally, she sat upright again. When she experienced no light-headedness and no tidal wave of nausea as a result, she heaved a relieved sigh and then slumped back against the back of the couch. She turned her head to look at Michael then, still pale-faced and with huge dark circles under her eyes. She smiled at him wanly.

"Actually," she answered, her voice hoarse with overwhelming weariness, "it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. It was even kind of…fascinating. Or it would have been, I think, under different circumstances. So I guess it really is true that you can get used to just about anything…"

Michael frowned at that, finding himself a bit confused. He'd figured that the experience of witnessing, of assisting with, brain surgery had made Bonnie understandably ill. But then a horrible thought occurred to him, another valid reason for Bonnie to have nearly passed out.

"Kitt…?" he ventured uncertainly.

"He's all right," Bonnie immediately assured him quietly, reaching over to lay a hand over one of Michael's and then patting it reassuringly. "Now," she added significantly, swallowing rapidly a few times as her stomach fought to settle while a heavy dose of terrified adrenaline left her system.

"Now?" Devon echoed, immediately concerned, and Bonnie blinked blearily at him, only just then realizing that the older man was there at all. He'd scooted his chair closer to the couch that she and Michael were occupying, and he was leaning forward almost anxiously, toward Bonnie, his elbows resting on his knees.

Bonnie nodded and then explained, "Jessica and I installed the hardware, and that all went well. Slowly but well. Really well, actually. Surprisingly well. And then I transferred Kitt to the new hardware, and _that_ seemed to go surprisingly well, too…until everything seemed to just…crash all of a sudden and then… And then his heart stopped. It all happened so fast, out of nowhere, just like _that_…"

She snapped her fingers to demonstrate while Michael and Devon exchanged an uneasy look.

"She's amazing, though," Bonnie was saying, meanwhile, shaking her head in wonder. "Jess, I mean. His heart stopped and do you know what she said? She said 'Whoopsie,'" Bonnie answered herself before either of the men could say anything. "Seriously, she said, 'Whoopsie!' I mean, can you _imagine_ being able to be so calm in that kind of situation? But apparently, cardiac arrest is not an entirely uncommon occurrence after brain surgery, especially not after something as…radical…as this was. So, they got him going again pretty quickly, just calm as you please. She and the anesthesiologist and the surgical nurse…all of them just la-dee-dah. I swear, they were _chatting_ at the same time that they were…"

"Well, that's…good," Michael murmured hesitantly as Bonnie's voice trailed off. "I mean, that they got him going again, not that they were chatting, necessarily." He shrugged uneasily and added, "But I guess it's something they deal with a lot, so..."

"Yeah," Bonnie answered, nodding absently. "Yeah, I guess if you have to resuscitate people practically every day, it does become sort of routine. But then his heart stopped again, a couple of minutes later. And they were all more concerned that time, and there was no chatting. And it took them a _lot_ longer to get him going again, too..."

"But they did, obviously," Devon prompted as Bonnie's voice trailed off again.

"They did, yes," Bonnie confirmed nodding her head against the back of the couch again. "But then it happened _again, _maybe five minutes later. And we were all worried. Definitely no chatting. Well, OK, _I_ was beyond worried. I was absolutely terrified, but there was nothing I could do except just stand there and…and _watch_. And I thought that was it, that this whole thing just wasn't going to work at all, that it had all been for nothing, and that he was going to…to…" She bit down hard into her lower lip then, almost hard enough to break the delicate skin and draw blood, as she stared fixedly up at the ceiling.

"But he's all right?" Michael asked anxiously when she didn't say anything else for a long moment.

Bonnie turned her head and blinked dully at him a few times.

"The third time's the charm, I guess," she said, swallowing hard. She lifted a hand to wave weakly at the operating room doors and added, "That was about forty-five minutes ago, and now they're in there…um, stapling his skull back together. That was kind of gross, so between the grossness and the adrenaline rush suddenly leaving…I just had to get out of there."

"That's understandable," Devon murmured.

"I'm sure Jess'll be out in a little bit, once she gets him…situated," Bonnie finished.

Sure enough, Jessica appeared about twenty minutes later, only to find herself being stared at expectantly by three sets of eyes.

"Hi," she said to them.

"Hello," Devon answered her while Michael and Bonnie continued to just stare at her.

Jessica pointed at Bonnie and asked, "Did she tell you?"

"About his heart stopping three times?" Michael asked in return. "She did," he confirmed. "And?"

Jessica nodded and said, "And right now, he's doing fine. His vitals are good, for the most part. No more hiccups."

"Is that what you call them?" Devon asked dubiously, raising an eyebrow at her.

"It's as good a layman's term as any," Jessica quietly answered, with a tired shrug. And then she walked over to a chair and collapsed bonelessly into it. She heaved a blissful sigh as she did so, insanely happy to be off her feet. "And for the moment," she said once she'd squirmed around a bit to settle herself comfortably, "that's about _all_ that I can tell you." She gestured with her chin at Bonnie and added, "Bonnie says that the…technology…is working as it should, and since she's the expert on that stuff, we all just have to take her word for it. And as for his current non-technological…um, half…and how well the two halves are getting along with each other and all that… Well, I'll know a lot more about that when he's closer to being conscious."

"And that will be when?" Michael prompted.

Jessica smiled wearily at him and answered, "Not for quite a while yet. I'm going to keep him under for at least the next two or three days. Possibly more, if I decide that he needs it," she warned. "He needs the time," she said in answer to the question that immediately bloomed on Michael's face, before he had the chance to voice it. "Because besides the trauma of radical neurosurgery, that body needs time to get back up to speed before he can be conscious again. That can't be rushed or else it might decide to just go off and crash from shock again. Plus, I need to get him off that damned ventilator, and _that_ can't be rushed, either, not after he's been on it for so long…"

Her voice trailed off then and she closed her eyes as she rubbed wearily at her forehead and then reached back to unclip the barrette that was holding the front of her hair out of her face. She let the strip of metal and plastic slip from her fingers and down onto the floor as she shook her head sharply to redistribute her hair's heavy weight. She hoped that doing so would help to head off the headache that was rapidly forming, even though she knew that its real cause was abysmally low blood sugar. Sighing, she opened her eyes again a moment later to find both Michael and Devon staring at her anxiously. Bonnie was merely watching her sympathetically, blearily, her own eyes clouded with the exhaustion that was evident on her face and in her slumped posture. She was visibly listing against the back of the couch now, and Jessica was fairly certain that if Michael didn't move, Bonnie would be using him as a pillow in the very near future.

"Really, he's all right," Jessica reassured the two men in particular as she tried to blink the grit out of her eyes. "I swear. And Raf'll be keeping a constant and _very_ close eye on him for at least the next eight hours or so, until I feel comfortable enough to move him away from close proximity to an OR."

"Raf?" Devon echoed, raising his eyebrows questioningly.

"Rafael Espinoza. My favorite nurse ever," Jessica answered with a fond smile. "I don't operate without him, not if I can help it, because there's hardly anything that I can do that he _can't_ do. Really, Kitt couldn't be in better hands," she assured them. "S'why I'm gonna be keeping Raf here for…a while. Until I'm sure Kitt's gonna be OK, at least. _Probably_ until he's up and about, even…"

Her voice trailed off again, this time into a mumble, and her eyes drifted slowly closed again. They did so completely against her will, but she found that there was suddenly little she could do about it. She was pushing forty-eight hours of wakefulness again. Surgery always kept her awake, alert, and focused, especially such highly technical microsurgery as she had just performed, but once it was over, she tended to crash very quickly.

But she gasped and her eyes snapped open again when Michael quietly but decisively announced, "I want to see him."

Jessica frowned at him and answered, "I'm not sure that's a good idea, Michael."

"I don't care," Michael insisted, his voice flat, brooking no argument. "I want to see him," he repeated.

"He's not the prettiest sight in the world," Jessica warned, still frowning.

"Jess, I don't care if his insides are on the outside," Michael insisted again. "Just…please."

Jessica sighed…and then she melted under the assault of the baby blue puppy-dog eyes that Michael was leveling at her and that were made even more devastatingly blue by the fact that he was wearing a light blue shirt.

"All right, all right," she relented. "I'll give y'all a few minutes. But that's _all_ you get." She pointed and then waved a warning finger at him and added, very seriously, "And _no_ arguing with me when I say that time's up, do you understand me?"

Michael nodded, mollified.

"I understand," he confirmed, agreeing to her terms.

Jessica heaved a resigned sigh and then pushed herself up out of her chair. Michael rose from the couch he'd been sitting on at the same time, and as if that was some kind of trigger, Bonnie finally slumped sideways, slipping slowly down against the back of the couch as she succumbed to sleep. Michael smiled affectionately down at her, at her uncomfortable-looking position, and then made a move to tend to her. But Devon pushed himself out of his chair then in order to intervene.

"I'll take care of her," he assured Michael. He exchanged a glance with Jessica, smiled at her, and then added, "Go. Before Jessica exercises her woman's prerogative and changes her mind."

* * *

><p>At the back of the operating room was a pair of doors that led to a small recovery room. Jessica led Michael into it, and the first thing that he saw was another man. He was short, compact, Hispanic, maybe in his mid-40s, and he was wearing scrubs. Michael deduced that the man must be the Rafael of which Jessica had spoken.<p>

"Rafael," she said, confirming Michael's deduction, "this is Michael Knight. Michael, Rafael Espinoza."

As they shook hands, Michael said, "I hear that you're the best."

Rafael shrugged dismissively and answered, "Hey, if you suck up to Mac enough, she'll occasionally say something nice about you."

As Michael chuckled at that and answered, "I'll keep that in mind," Jessica playfully kicked Rafael's shin.

"Kook," she muttered under her breath. And then she asked Rafael, "How's it going?"

Rafael gave her a thumbs-up and cheerfully answered, "Good. A-OK."

His answer was much too cheerful, in Jessica's estimation, but since she suspected that the answer was more for Michael's benefit than for her own, anyway, she let it go. For the moment. But once Michael had turned away, she gave the nurse an inquisitive "Later for you" look before her gaze slid back to Michael. She watched him take a few tentative steps toward the bed where Kitt was lying before following in his wake.

Michael hadn't had much of an opportunity to spend time with the body into which they were going to move Kitt. He hadn't cared to, really, because the overriding concept of what they were planning to do had, in Michael's opinion, a fairly high creepiness quotient. Of course, he was entirely willing to deal with the creepiness, for Kitt's sake, but on the other hand, he'd been quite happy to spend more of his time out on the road instead, trying to first find the person to do the actual moving and then to help convince them of the necessity of doing so. And once that had been accomplished, he'd been happy to spend all of his time, literally every waking moment and even most of his sleeping moments, with Kitt, keeping him company, keeping him distracted, keeping him entertained as much as possible, given the situation. Still, Michael did know that the body was young, and he vaguely remembered black hair. Lots of shaggy, overgrown black hair.

The body was indeed young, so he saw now, but there was no hair anymore. Instead, his head was studded with an array of electroencephalograph electrodes and, worse, further marred with a disturbingly large and vicious-looking oval of thick, evenly-spaced metal staples in its right side. The entire circle was encrusted with goopy-looking scabs of dried and congealing blood, and the pillow behind his head was liberally stained with still more dark spatters and smears of blood, too. All of it stopped Michael in his tracks, and he sensed more than saw Jessica pause as well, just a step or two behind him.

"Not the prettiest sight in the world," he murmured.

"I _did_ warn you," Jessica murmured back.

Michael swallowed hard, blanched, and asked, tentatively, "Aren't there usually…Oh, I dunno… _Bandages_?"

Jessica smiled tiredly up at him and answered, "Until I'm sure that I won't have to go right back in there? No, not yet. And you're seeing him _long_ before you're really supposed to be seeing him, you know."

Michael swallowed again, glanced over his shoulder at her for a moment, and interpreted, "In other words...I asked for this, and you're giving me a visual 'I told you so.'"

"In other words…Yeah, exactly that," Jessica confirmed with a sage little nod and a smirky little smile.

"God, no wonder you get along so well with Kitt," Michael muttered grumpily.

Jessica chuckled quietly.

"C'mon," she said as she reached out to wrap a small hand around Michael's forearm, scooted around him, and then yanked on the arm she had in her grasp to lead him over to the bed. "I'm not going to give y'all much time, so you'd best make the most of it," she was saying.

Unfortunately, the view didn't get any better at closer range. This, Michael discovered as he came to a halt at the side of the bed.

They had the head of the bed raised, probably to help with swelling. The bed was surrounded by equipment that Michael had no hope of understanding and that, really, he didn't want to understand. Some of it was beeping quietly away; some of it was silent. Some of it had monitors attached that glowed and displayed cryptic, continuously changing graphical read-outs or just continuously running lines of mysterious numbers and text. And all of the equipment, of course, was attached in some way to the deathly pale, emaciated, frail-looking body that was currently housing his partner. The ventilator was still attached, accessing his trachea directly through a hole just above the hollow of his throat that at least wasn't plainly visible. It was still quietly whooshing away, making his thin chest rhythmically rise and fall with mechanical precision. And there were almost more wires attached to him and tubes inserted into him in various locations than Michael could count, and many of them were large and looked distinctly painful. Especially the really big and nasty-looking one that stabbed deeply into the meager flesh just below his exposed left collarbone. And that was just the parts of his body that were visible; Michael really didn't want to think about what he couldn't see.

He swallowed again, distastefully, but he still didn't regret the request that he'd made. He'd had to see Kitt for himself. He wasn't entirely sure why, but it had been an overwhelmingly strong imperative. It was almost as if he couldn't or wouldn't believe that Kitt was really, truly alive until he actually saw him, or at least saw the body into which he'd been integrated, until he saw that it was breathing and had a heartbeat. But now that he _had_ seen Kitt…he still wasn't sure that he was actually alive. Perhaps he wouldn't really, truly believe that Kitt was alive until he heard him speak, until he could talk to him, until he could trade a reassuringly caustic quip or five with him…

"God, buddy," Michael murmured more to himself than to anyone else. He ran both hands through his hair as he added, "What have we done to you?"

"What we had to do," Jessica answered him quietly, giving his arm that she still had a hold of a reassuring pat. Then she turned away and pulled a chair over to the bedside. "Sit down, Michael," she said gently to him. "Talk to him."

Michael frowned up at her questioningly as he sat down and said, "He can't hear me." His frown deepened as he added an almost hopeful, "Can he?"

Jessica shrugged as she answered, "Most likely not. On the other hand, given what he is…Who knows?"

Michael smiled at that, one of his wide, sweet smiles that made his eyes twinkle. This smile was made even sweeter by its complete lack of deliberately charming artifice. Jessica smiled back at him and gave his shoulder a gentle, encouraging pat as Michael turned back to Kitt and, doing as he was told, started talking.

Meanwhile, Jessica sidled up to Rafael and asked, quietly enough so that Michael wouldn't hear, "OK, so how's it _really_ going?"

Rafael bit down on his lower lip, shook his head slightly, and then equally quietly answered, "He's still v-taching, and his BP is correspondingly unstable. About ten minutes ago, it all started going a little scary again, so I went ahead and gave him a push of lidocaine into the subclavian line. It seems to have helped, so I'm thinking that we should probably go ahead and add it to his drip."

Jessica nodded and rubbed briskly at her face with both hands in an attempt to stave off a strong urge to fall asleep where she stood. She answered with a sigh, "I'm _hoping_ that this little issue he's having will clear up once his neurotransmitter levels stabilize, but for now…Yes, I agree. Do we have bags here?"

"Nope," Rafael replied with a shake of his head. "But we've got enough for pushes for a couple of days."

"Well, I'll just put it on the old shopping list, then," Jessica said with a weary sigh, this time pressing the heel of a slightly trembling hand against her forehead as her blood sugar headache intensified. "In the meantime, keep giving him a CV push every ninety minutes. And let me know if there's anything else we're going to need that I didn't anticipate."

"I will," Rafael confirmed. "Oh, and everything else _is_ looking good so far. For real," he added quietly, with a white-toothed smile.

"Good," Jessica answered, nodding. "Keep on top of it, will you?"

"You know I will," Rafael answered with a confident nod of his own. He paused, frowning thoughtfully at his patient for a long moment, and then he lowered his voice still further, leaned a bit closer to Jessica, and said, "You know, Mac… I've seen you do some amazing things, some crazy things, and even some downright miraculous things over the years, but _this_…This takes the cake, on all three counts."

Jessica smiled and answered tiredly, "Yeah, I know. But it wasn't just me this time, Raf. In fact, in some ways, mine was the _easy_ part. And really, if y'all want _truly_ amazing, crazy, and miraculous…Well, just wait until you actually meet him." She gestured at Kitt's still form with her chin then, smiling at him and Michael almost maternally.

"I'll look forward to it," Rafael softly answered while Jessica turned toward him in order to slip a piece of paper into the breast pocket of his scrub shirt.

"My pager number," she explained to him as he frowned down at her. "Page me when you need to be relieved, all right? Or if something too scary to handle alone happens, of course." As Rafael nodded, Jessica shifted her gaze toward Michael. "Time's up, Michael," she said to him quietly, and when Michael looked up at her, his eyes somewhat haunted, she added, "Look, I need food before I go crash for a while. Join me?"

Michael quirked a smile at her and teased, "For the food or the crashing?"

Jessica snorted and answered, "Both, if you like. But mostly for the food."

"You know," Michael further teased, "your capacity to eat right after poking around in someone's brain never ceases to amaze me."

Jessica smiled back, folding her arms over her chest as she answered, "Yeah, well, I must've been a zombie in a previous life because brains make me hungry."

"Weirdo," Michael accused, chuckling despite himself.

"Guilty as charged," Jessica immediately shot back. "C'mon," she added, jerking her head toward the door. And as Michael glanced uncertainly down at Kitt, she gently and very seriously added, "He'll be all right, Michael. I promise."

And as Jessica smiled at him sincerely, the teasing gone for the moment, Michael was somehow, suddenly, certain that she was right. He pushed himself to his feet then, nodded at her, and then followed in her wake out through the operating room and its little waiting room, where Bonnie was comfortably curled up on the couch. She had a cushy pillow tucked under her head, and she was covered with a soft blanket that had been carefully tucked in around her shoulders, both of which Devon must have been responsible for. Michael couldn't help smiling at her as he and Jessica moved onward, headed for the kitchen. And as they did so, Michael felt, for the first time in what felt like forever, a tiny flare of incongruous, cautious optimism.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Next time:<strong> Wakey wakies! ;)_

_Annnnnd…This is where I usually put review replies. But it's been so long since I updated this story that doing that just seems…weird. (Although I do of course **very** much appreciate those that have been left for the last few chapters! Like every other attention-whoring fanfic author out there, I do love comments, good or bad.) So…We'll just start fresh, yes? Leave me a review, if you like, and I'll talk back at ya next time. :) Until then…Later, my pretties._


	12. Chapter 12

_So here's the next part of the tale. Sorry it took me a bit. I did have a mostly-intact copy of this section, so it **would** have appeared sooner…except that I decided that it wasn't nearly all that it could be. For one thing, there was far, far too much passive voice and "tell, don't show" for my likings. So, I decided to more or less completely rewrite all of it. And, in particular, the middle section gave me screaming fits because my latent masochism reared its ugly head, and I merrily decided that it would be really fun to write it from Kitt's perspective. _

_Fun. Right. Not._

_Buuuuuuuut…I think in the end it's much better than the original was. (You, of course, will just have to take my word for it. :) ) I could still endlessly fuss with it and pick at it, 'cuz that's what I do…but then it'd never appear, at least not in anything like a timely time frame. ;) So I'm forcing myself not to fuss with it anymore and…here it is, for better or worse._

_And, as promised last time, review replies are below. :)_

* * *

><p>"Whoa! Easy there, pal," Michael said to Kitt as he caught the wildly flailing left forearm. <em>Kitt's<em> wildly flailing left forearm. It was still doing strange things to Michael's mind to think of these various body parts as belonging to Kitt. After all, when the word "Kitt" entered his mind, the image that accompanied the name was that of a sleek, black, and virtually indestructible Trans Am, not the pale-skinned, fragile, and much-too-young creature that lay before him now. He wondered if his brain would ever be able to make the transition, if he'd ever be able to see the person before him as Kitt instead of some separate and completely alien entity that his partner just happened to be inhabiting for a while. And, more importantly, he wondered if _Kitt's_ brain would be able to make that same kind of transition. On both counts, particularly the latter for Kitt's sake, he hoped so.

"Easy now. There you go," he murmured in a soothing tone as he gently pressed Kitt's wrist against the bed, keeping the arm carefully straight in deference to the array of catheters that studded it in various spots. Michael had no idea if Kitt could hear him on any level yet. It was just that talking to him had become something of a habit, even when he had known, for sure, that Kitt couldn't possibly hear him, as completely doped to the eyeballs on God-knew-what as he'd been for what seemed like days on end.

But this time, for the first time, Kitt swallowed thickly, reflexively, and then he emitted a weak and incoherent noise in response to Michael's voice, almost as if he was trying to answer him. He also made a feeble attempt to jerk his arm out of Michael's grip, but he didn't have the strength to dislodge the gentle but firm one-handed grasp that was pinning his arm to the bed. Not yet, anyway. So, after a short struggle, and after Michael had chided him with a gentle, "Knock if off, will ya?" he surrendered with another incoherent murmur. Once Kitt had settled down again, Michael reached out with his other hand to stroke the safer, undamaged left side of his head, the gesture one of comfort and approval.

"Wow, doing what you're told for once in your life," he murmured with a small smile as he let go of Kitt's arm. "You're _never_ gonna live this down, buddy," he informed Kitt affectionately. More loudly, he announced to the room at large, "These things are bugging him."

The "things" in question were the four catheters that were still studding Kitt's left forearm. Michael gestured in particular at the big, fat, nasty-looking IV that punctured a very painful-looking spot just below the inside of his elbow. It was delivering large, concentrated doses of post-operative antibiotics directly into one of the larger blood vessels there because, so Jessica had muttered to no one in particular, the very last thing that they needed was for him to contract an infection. So the thing was serving a vital purpose, but just looking at it gave Michael the creeps.

Jessica was at that moment fussing with Kitt's three IV pumps, most of her attention focused on minutely fine-tuning the various lines' infusion rates for about the thousandth time in the last day-and-a-half. She didn't spare a glance at Michael, but she did nod absently, acknowledging what he'd said, as she mildly answered, "Yes, I know. He's left-handed."

Michael aimed an uncomprehending look at her even though she wasn't looking at him, and then asked her, "And…you know that how?"

Jessica answered, straight-faced and deadpan and not taking her eyes off the IV pump that she was adjusting, "Because I'm psychic, of course."

"More like psycho," Michael immediately shot back, with a snort.

Jessica smiled at that, not bothering to dispute his claim, as she answered, "No, really. Big catheters stuck in one's dominant side tend to be really annoying, especially when one is trying to move around while regaining consciousness from heavy sedation, much less from about six months of coma. Trying to violently shake them off like he's doing is the typical semiconscious reaction to that particular kind of annoyance. So, between that and the fact that _everything_ he's doing, he's doing left-side-first…?"

Her voice trailed off into a shrug, and Michael finished her thought for her.

"That points to him being a lefty," he concluded, nodding. He grinned widely as he quietly added, "Well, that's fitting."

"Y'all would know," Jessica just as quietly answered, shrugging again as Michael propped one elbow on the edge of the bed and then cupped the side of his face in his hand as he stared at Kitt, watching him intently.

It had been about thirty-six hours since Jessica had started to wean Kitt off the sedatives that had kept him motionless and deeply unconscious for five days after the surgery to relocate him. During those five days, his condition had slowly improved, but it had taken his too-fast and too-weak heart rhythm quite a bit longer than Jessica had initially estimated to stabilize. That had had her very worried for a few tense days, until it had eventually, finally, settled down over the course of the fourth day after the surgery. All of his vital signs had subsequently strengthened and then stabilized on the low side of normal shortly after that, and once they had consistently stayed that way for twenty-four hours, Jessica had announced that she was comfortable with the idea of letting him wake up. She had begun to slowly decrease the dosage of the cocktail of sedatives that was being pumped into his system then, slowly and carefully weaning him off them.

She'd also had time to wean Kitt slowly and carefully off the ventilator. The process had been a little bumpy, but just as Jessica had predicted, once almost literally kicked into gear, the body that Kitt was living in for the moment could indeed breathe perfectly well on its own. In fact, the only evidence that his body had spent months connected to a ventilator was a small patch of gauze covering what had been a small hole near the base of his throat. Michael had watched with fascinated if faintly nauseated interest as Jessica had closed that hole with uniformly tiny, precise, and very neat little stitches that were much easier to look upon than the nasty-looking metal staples that were holding his skull together as the bone knitted itself back together. But Michael had even gotten used to looking at those as the hours that slowly bled into days had crawled by. Bonnie had been right: It was indeed possible to get used to just about anything. Besides, a dense forest of black fuzz had already sprouted on Kitt's head. It was, so Michael had discovered, kitten-soft to the touch, and at the rate that it was growing in, the damage that the surgery had wrought would be well concealed in a relatively short amount of time.

And now, as Jessica and the nurses progressively dialed down the powerful sedatives that had been keeping him under, Kitt was slowly working his way toward consciousness. His efforts to do so seemed to come and go in waves, as if he periodically swam his way up toward the surface of a pool only to find that he didn't quite have the strength to break through, so he'd sink back down again and then stay down there for a while, marshaling his resources and biding his time. But as the long hours passed, the stretches of time when he was completely out shortened and the stretches of time that he spent fighting for consciousness lengthened. And somewhat to Michael's consternation, he'd started to move during those semiconscious periods as well.

It was just an occasional twitch here and there at first, but it wasn't long before he was moving extremities and then entire limbs in an almost systematic sort of way, as if he was slowly figuring things out and then struggling to assert his will on the completely alien body that he was wearing. Jessica had pointed out that he was moving around much more than the average person in his situation normally would be able to move, and she surmised that asserting his will was likely exactly what he was doing. And she was just happy to see that he was able move everything.

"So far, so good," she'd murmured, more to herself than to anyone who'd been in the room at the time.

At about the same time he'd started moving, Kitt had also started to make occasional incoherent noises, interspersed between quiet whimpers born of what was quite obviously pain; they slipped out of him whenever he moved his head too much or too sharply. Once or twice over the past couple of hours, his eyes had even fluttered open very briefly, but they hadn't focused on anything so it had been obvious that he wasn't actually seeing yet. Still, his eyes had been open long enough to see what color they were before they had fluttered closed again: Around sedative-dilated pupils, Michael had glimpsed a light ring of greeny-hazel.

And now, Kitt was moving again, this time with much more strength and coordination than he'd so far displayed. He moved agitatedly, twisting his body and tossing his head to the side so that its ravaged right side collided with the pillow behind it, hard enough to make Michael wince in sympathy as Kitt emitted a pained whimper and then reflexively jerked his head away from the pain. That sharp movement only made him whimper again, more loudly this time.

"Shhhh. Easy," Michael murmured at him, and then he settled into a mostly-meaningless but soothing litany, just in case Kitt could hear him. "It's all right. Just take it easy, buddy. Nice and easy. Shhhhh…"

But Kitt continued to shift restlessly, his movements gaining rapidly in strength and coordination. And then, unexpectedly, completely surprising even Jessica, he managed to push himself entirely over onto his left side, ending up leaning heavily into the raised head of the bed, breathing heavily from the effort he'd just expended. It hadn't been a graceful maneuver by any means, but it was still impressive given that he was hovering somewhere around only half-conscious. After resting for a moment, he began to fine-tune his position, shifting slightly this way and that. Michael, concerned, made a move to still him, but Jessica laid a hand on his shoulder, staying him.

"It's all right, Michael," she murmured to him as she watched Kitt intently. "Let him find his comfy place."

"But what if he rips something out or something?" Michael worriedly countered, gesturing in particular at the nasty CV line that was still embedded in the left side of his upper chest. Given Kitt's newly-acquired position, it appeared to be getting a little crushed, and that made Michael more than a little uneasy. After all, just looking at the thing still made him faintly queasy.

Jessica smiled down at Michael, patting his shoulder reassuringly as she answered, "Worry not. _That_ one is very well anchored. All nice and tunneled underneath his skin, even."

Michael shuddered, swallowed distastefully, and muttered, "Oh, did you _have_ to remind me?"

Out of morbid curiosity, he'd asked Rafael a few days before about what the thing was, and unfortunately for Michael, Rafael had been all too happy to satisfy his curiosity. He'd gotten to the part about it essentially being a long tube that had been threaded all the way into Kitt's heart, via one of the very large veins that fed into it, so that, among other things, drugs could be delivered directly into his heart and from there distributed much more quickly up to what was left of his brain. At that point, Michael had decided that he _really_ didn't want to know any more.

Jessica was snorting, meanwhile. She patted the top of Michael's head patronizingly as she exaggeratedly drawled, "Welcome to the wonderful world of intensive care, darlin'. Don't tell me y'all've never been there before."

"Yeah, I have been," Michael answered testily. "But I was always the patient, so I really didn't have to look at, much less _think_ about, all this creepy stuff all the time." He shuddered again, for good measure.

Jessica snickered and squeezed his shoulder consolingly.

"Hey, look on the bright side," she said to him. "If he keeps improving the way he has been over the past few days, I'll be able to take out the CV line and a couple of the other nastier ones, as well, in a day or two. At the very least," she finished, "he'll be done with the antibiotics the day after tomorrow."

"The sooner the better," Michael said with a shiver and an emphatic nod. Fewer nasty things sticking into the body of his partner was a very good thing, as far as he was concerned.

"But until then," Jessica continued, "he might feel a need to pick at the CV line's insertion point. Don't let him, or else he might tear the sutures that are anchoring it." She took a moment to survey Kitt's new position then, watching him slowly sink back down into mostly-unconsciousness again, gathering his strength. She said to Michael, gesturing at Kitt's left arm, "And if he decides he likes being on his side like that long-term, make sure that he doesn't end up laying on that arm. Cutting off its circulation would be a very bad idea." As Michael nodded in silent acknowledgment, she finished, "And in the meantime…I think I'm going to go give Bonnie a call."

Michael had stayed more or less constantly at Kitt's bedside ever since they'd moved him back upstairs. When he'd needed to sleep, he'd slept on the couch in the room, unperturbed by anything that went on around him. Several times, Jessica had attempted to evict him, but he would have none of it, and after a few days, she had given up her efforts and simply accepted the fact that Michael was an immovable object. Devon flitted in and out, too, checking on things, keeping Michael company for a while, and sometimes delivering coffee and food. And Bonnie had spent as much time as she could with Kitt, but much of her time, of necessity, had been spent addressing the issue of the invasive subroutine that still plagued the software left behind in the Trans Am. It could no longer do any irreparable damage since Kitt was no longer in residence, but it needed to be expunged. Doing so had proved a formidable task, however, and it was requiring Bonnie's expertise and, as a result, her more or less constant presence. But she had wanted to be there when Kitt regained consciousness, naturally, so she had made everyone involved in his care solemnly swear that they would call her when it looked like that was about to happen, no matter what time it was and no matter what she was doing otherwise.

So Michael looked up sharply at Jessica now, raising his eyebrows inquisitively as he asked, "You think he's going to wake up?"

"I've shut off the sedatives completely now, so…" Jessica answered with a shrug. "I think it's a distinct possibility, yes." She glanced at the various monitors that were arrayed around and above the head of the bed. She nodded absently at what they were telling her and added, quietly, "And soon."

* * *

><p>Kitt's very first impulse was to access his diagnostics, and his first reaction, upon receiving no response and certainly no data after attempting to do so, was puzzlement that was immediately chased by a touch of concern over the fact that his diagnostics didn't appear to be working. That was something that normally indicated dire damage, and that thought was, as always, daunting. But then, seconds later, he remembered everything. He remembered where he was, for now. He remembered <em>what<em> he was, for now. He remembered that he didn't have diagnostics anymore, and he remembered why he didn't have them.

After that… At first, there was only pain. Of course, he didn't immediately know what that was, really. He had no label to attach to the experience of it, no convenient compartment to place it in, nothing against which to compare it. All he knew was that it was a new sensation, something that he'd never experienced before.

Under normal circumstances, Kitt actively sought new experiences. He reveled in them, even, and good or bad, he learned from them. But this sensation, this experience, was uncomfortable and unpleasant in the extreme, and there seemed to be little to learn from it except perhaps to learn how he might contrive to avoid it in the future. From there, he decided that what he was experiencing must indeed be pain. If nothing else, it made sense that he'd be experiencing it, given the radical and highly invasive surgical procedure that the body that he was wearing had undergone. And it occurred to him, in a fuzzy sort of way, that pain was something like diagnostics, except much less helpfully detailed and vastly more disagreeable.

He'd asked Michael, once, not long after his "birth," what pain was like. He'd been curious about it, intensely curious, as he was about everything that he hadn't yet experienced or that, so he'd thought, he would never be able to experience. Michael hadn't been able to provide a satisfactory answer to his query, but that hadn't been his fault. Kitt had simply had no frame of reference for such a sensation, and describing something as subjective as a sensation with no common frame of reference was nothing less than an impossible task. Michael could only describe pain in terms of other sensations, or the absence of them, of all of which Kitt also had no conception.

But Kitt had a frame of reference, now. The irony was that, in acquiring a frame of reference, he no longer needed anyone to tell him what pain was like. He knew what it was like, now, all of a sudden. It was a very rude epiphany, and, his curiosity on the subject fully satisfied, he wanted it to stop. But it wouldn't stop, and it wasn't within his power to make it stop, either. It wasn't as if he could bypass a misbehaving circuit or an entire malfunctioning system in order to do so, not anymore. All that he could do was endure the pain and hope that it would fade with time or, perhaps, that he'd simply get used to it.

Time did pass. He was aware of its passing in an indistinct and indifferent sort of way, as he floated in a dark, hazy realm full of newly-discovered pain and, eventually, of dim, vague, garbled sounds. The sounds might have been voices, perhaps words that were being spoken to him. With that in mind, he tried to listen to them, tried to understand them…but, to his utter frustration, he failed. Still, as more time passed, he did find that he was able to initialize and engage the various pathways that allowed him to move the ponderous cage of alien flesh and bone in which he was bound. Figuring out how to do so was a slow process, and even once he'd laboriously figured out the basics, he'd only discovered that his body was heavy and sluggish, very slow to respond to his commands. _He_ felt slow as well. Cloudy. Not quite all there.

This was, he slowly, blearily realized, the effect of drugs. He knew all about drugs, down to their minute molecular structure…or at least he _had_ known all about them, once upon a time. He remembered having had the knowledge, but the detailed database of information didn't seem to be there anymore. In fact, much of the information that he'd once possessed didn't seem to be there anymore, all of it casualties of Bonnie's careful, space-conserving picking and choosing of the information that would make the trip with him into this strange new world. Nevertheless, he _had_ known about drugs at one point, but they'd never been able to affect him. Now, he didn't know about them except in the barest, most simplistic terms, yet he was suddenly and entirely vulnerable to them. The remains of a human brain was the conduit that connected him to his current body, and that remnant was highly susceptible to the dulling, soporific effects of something like narcotics. In turn, _he_ was apparently vulnerable to those effects, as well. Somehow. Via some mechanism that, for the moment, he couldn't entirely understand. So, he didn't try to do so. Not yet.

Instead, he accepted it as just another new experience to add to his tally. It was a very frustrating new experience, however, given that aside from the cloudiness and a vague, unsettling feeling of disconnection and disembodiment, he seemed to be more awake than was the body that he was going to be forced to call home for an indeterminate amount of time. And, unfortunately, he could do absolutely nothing without his body's cooperation. He couldn't really blame the body, however. It had been mostly non-functional for almost six months and so he needed to, as the saying went, cut it some slack. Acknowledging that simple truth didn't make waiting for his current body to catch up with him any less frustrating, however.

Still, as Kitt managed to move experimentally and with increasing dexterity as he mastered more and more of his current body's myriad motor pathways, he found that certain configurations of his body resulted in intensified pain while others resulted in, blissfully, decreased pain. So then it only made logical sense to settle, utterly relieved, into one of those less-painful positions…but once he'd managed to do so, he found that his body seemed even heavier and weaker than it had been before, in the wake of the effort it had just expended. It seemed too heavy, really, to move it further. And he found that he was suddenly hazy and rather deeply confused, too.

This, he decided, had to be weariness. Physical fatigue. Like being in pain, exhaustion wasn't a condition that he'd ever experienced before, so it frightened him in a strangely distant way, as if the fear wasn't really his but someone else's, and he was merely an outsider who was observing it from afar. He lay there for a time, vaguely aware, somehow, that he was lying, albeit half upright, on his side. And for a very long while, just lying there, his body limp and exhausted and completely unresponsive to even vehement prodding on his part, was all that he was capable of doing. Unbidden, an oft-repeated saying came to Kitt, out of nowhere: _The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak._ Like his sudden, intimate comprehension of pain, that particular saying suddenly made all sorts of sense to Kitt as well.

More time passed. Kitt wasn't sure of the exact amount because he hadn't noted the time when he'd once again been mostly consumed by the darkness and the overwhelming weariness that had been pawing insistently at him. All that he knew was that it was later. The quality of the light that was uncomfortably stabbing through his closed eyelids had changed, intensified. And the darkness had receded. It was still there, hovering in the distance, perhaps waiting for a chance to overtake him again in a moment of weakness, but for the moment, it seemed less of an immediate threat.

On the other hand, the pain was suddenly far more immediate. More insistent. _Much_ more unpleasant. His head was screaming at him, and he was vaguely aware that his right arm reflexively and unsteadily lifted in response to the pain, the hand attached to it ending up pressing against the side of his head, as if that would help somehow. It didn't, not really, but there was one benefit of the maneuver: The new position of his hand apparently shaded his eyes. So, although the pain didn't lessen by any noticeable degree, there was suddenly less sensory input to process, and that was, for the moment, a good thing. He left his hand where it was, and then worked on pushing aside the pain. Doing so was difficult, especially since he had no prior experience at it.

But the sounds were still there, too, and so Kitt concentrated on them, hoping that doing so would distract him from the pain, just as concentrating on something else, _anything_ else, had always distracted him from unpleasantness before. And when he concentrated, the sounds did, indeed, slowly resolve into voices. He still didn't quite understand the words that they were saying, but the voices themselves were ones that he gladly and happily recognized, and focusing on them and trying to decode what they were saying did seem to have the effect of shunting aside the pain. There was Michael's comfortingly familiar timbre and cadence, even if the words that he was saying weren't quite registering yet. And there was Jessica's newer and less familiar Alabama twang, the soothing and almost musical softness of which he'd come to appreciate in the short time that he'd known her. She was apparently answering whatever it was that Michael had just said. And then there was Bonnie's voice, too, perhaps adding to whatever Jessica had just said. Just the sound of their voices was of enormous comfort.

And Kitt wanted, desperately wanted, to say something to them. Words to say formed easily enough in his mind, but he found, to his horror, that they had no outlet. He couldn't simply send a pithy command off to a voice modulator that would immediately synthesize the words that he wanted to say a nanosecond after they popped into his processors. No, the procedure in here was far more complicated than that…and it was a procedure that he hadn't had the time even to investigate, much less to master, yet.

A quiet sound did emanate from him, however. It was a wordless, meaningless half-murmur/half-groan that did somehow manage to have a note of urgency about it but that otherwise sounded completely alien to his own…ears. It flashed through Kitt's mind, briefly, that even when – _if_ – he figured out how to speak, he had no idea what he'd sound like, and the thought was more than a little disconcerting. It was another unwelcome reminder that he wasn't himself and that he wouldn't be himself, not until this was all over and he was safely home again…_if_ he could ever go home again. Another reflexive sound emerged from him at that thought, this one louder and more distressed. It was loud enough, apparently, to grab the attention of the others in the room with him. There was the sound of a flurry of movement, close by, and then there was a voice, and it was saying…It was saying his name.

"Kitt? Hey, buddy, you gonna come on up and join us now?"

It was Michael's voice, very close-by and very quiet and deeply, comfortingly solicitous, more soothing than Kitt had ever heard Michael be. And Kitt understood the words that Michael had said, too, all of them, which was at least of some relief. Even if he couldn't speak, he could at least understand what was said to him. That was…something.

Tentatively, warily, he opened his eyes, leaving his hand where it was in order to shade them. Still, a massive flood of chaotic light and color bombarded him, too much to differentiate, too much to process. Too much, too soon. Distantly, he heard another distressed noise emerge from himself as he slammed his eyes shut again and moved his hand slightly, so that it completely covered his eyes and then pressed hard against them, blocking out even the much-dimmer light that seeped through his eyelids. And then, his concentration lost, the pain assaulted him again and he heard, as if from far away, a long, keening whimper escape his own throat.

The voices were all around him then, but they were mushy now, only a few words distinguishable from the general and somewhat painful white noise into which they otherwise devolved. He picked out his name from the mush a few times and the tone of the voices that had said the word were concerned and growing more so as the seconds passed, but he couldn't respond to them, any of them. He could only flinch away from them because the sounds, the voices, were suddenly too much, too. Overwhelming.

And then…Then someone touched him. It was, he somehow knew in some tiny corner of his mind that was still desperately clinging to clear, rational thought, a gentle stroke of someone's hand along his shoulder. He knew that it was a gesture meant to be comforting, to express concern for him, but it only served to send still more overwhelming input streaming into his processors. To him, this was intense tactile sensation, a type of input that he didn't remotely know how to process and that, worse, seemed to synergistically magnify by at least an order of magnitude the pain that he was already experiencing.

A sound suddenly crackled through the room, one that he dimly recognized as something that was bordering on a scream, and he even more dimly realized that it had come from him. In the space of the same second, his entire body jerked reflexively away from the contact. It slammed backwards against something hard and unforgiving, and the movement and the impact only produced more pain and then a genuine scream and then… Then there was chaos as various sensory inputs began to feed off of each other, began to amplify each other, all of it morphing into a seething, boiling ocean of input that he couldn't even begin to process. All that he could do was drown in it.

Only a few stray sounds remained recognizable in the chaos that otherwise engulfed him. There was a beeping, a rhythmic but frantic mechanical beeping, and then…then there was Jessica's voice. Her soft drawl was hardened now to unyielding flint, and she uttered a single word that even he, in his overwhelmed state, understood.

"Move," she commanded, in a tone that demanded nothing less than immediate and unquestioning obedience.

And then even the tiny piece of himself that had been clinging to rationality lost its grip, and Kitt was falling, but slowly, as if in extended slow motion. The bright, screaming chaos was still all around him, buffeting him harshly, but he was falling, sliding through it, toward a pit of utter blackness that did not frighten him. In fact, he welcomed it, even willed himself to fall faster into it. Anything to escape the chaotic madness that was tormenting him. And then blackness and a warm, welcome numbness were clawing at him, and he didn't resist them, and the overwhelming everything that had been plaguing him all abruptly dissolved into blissful nothingness once again.

* * *

><p>"What the <em>hell<em> was that?" Michael quietly demanded, still keeping a firm grip on Kitt even as his body quickly relaxed under the onslaught of whatever it was that Jessica had just shot him up with; she'd plunged a syringe of something into the CV line's injection port so that whatever it had been had had a more or less immediate effect. Slowly, when he was sure that there would be no more wild, panicked thrashing or slamming into the bed rail behind him, Michael let Kitt go and then sank, shaking, into the chair that he'd been sitting in, that he'd pulled over to the bedside when it had looked like Kitt was going to wake up.

And wake up he had…but the result certainly hadn't been all that they'd hoped for.

Bonnie and Jessica shared a foreboding look, meanwhile, after which Jessica ventured, "Sensory overload?"

Bonnie nodded in agreement as she said sadly and very quietly, "I was afraid that would happen."

"So was Kitt," Jessica added in the same quiet, sad tone.

Michael frowned at both of them.

"What?" he asked.

Bonnie sighed as she sank down onto the side of the bed. She watched Kitt for a few moments and then answered, "Think of it this way, Michael: For his entire life, he's lived in a body that feels virtually nothing, certainly not pain. And that body also has sensors that he has complete control over, that he can ramp up or damp down at will, as needed, so that he can control what and how much he perceives _and_ at what intensity level he perceives those things."

"But now," Jessica picked up, nodding, "he's in an alien body that he's only just learning how to control. And it can feel _everything, _things he's never experienced before and that he doesn't know how to process yet. Like pain, for instance. Worse, he can't stop himself from feeling everything_._ You saw the way he reacted when Bonnie touched him?"

Michael nodded, frowning at Kitt speculatively.

"That was definitely over-stimulation," Jessica continued quietly. "Probably just from that tiny bit of tactile sensation when he was already trying to deal with pain. Everything else was just icing on the nasty cake," she finished, shaking her head sadly.

Bonnie nodded, agreeing. She pushed aside the guilt that she was feeling because guilt was unproductive.

"He's going to need time to adjust to everything," she said. "And…Of anyone, _I _should have known that." She looked at Jessica and said, quietly, "I'm sorry."

Jessica smiled at the other woman, and said, forgivingly, "You were just being a good mama." And as Bonnie quirked a half-smile at that Jessica added, reassuringly, "No permanent harm done."

"So what do we do now?" Michael asked after a moment. He was staring at Kitt, resisting the urge to reach out and touch him comfortingly in some way, since that obviously brought him no comfort at all.

Jessica frowned in thought for a moment and answered, "Well, I'm going to step up the pain meds, for one thing. Less pain will hopefully make all the other input a little less overwhelming. Something non-narcotic, I think..."

"Other than that…" Bonnie added as Jessica chewed on her lower lip in thought and then wandered off toward the drug cabinet. "Well, frankly, there isn't a whole lot else that we _can_ do, Michael. I'm confident that he'll adapt, eventually. It's…what he does, in general. But like I said it'll take time, so we're all just going to have to be patient with him and give him just that." Michael gave her a look and she added, "I know it's completely counter-intuitive to us. Our impulse is to lovingly smother him, but…we're all going to have to give him breathing room. This is all completely new to him. And probably terrifying."

Michael nodded, swallowing uncertainly.

"And in the short term," Jessica put in over her shoulder as she rummaged around in the drug cabinet, "that Brevital I just gave him isn't going to last long, half an hour, an hour at the _very_ most. And when he wakes up again, this room needs to be dark, and it needs to be quiet, and we'll all have to resist the urge to touch him."

"And then what?" Michael quietly asked.

Finding what she wanted, murmuring a triumphant "Ah-hah!," Jessica turned to face them again. She shrugged and answered Michael, "And then we see how it goes from there. We follow his lead. This is totally uncharted territory," she finished with a sigh, "so I'm afraid that's all we can do."

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><p><em>I wish to thank Vanessa Mae's album entitled "Subject to Change" for getting me through rewriting especially the middle section of this chapter without yanking out every last hair on my head. ;) I don't know why, but violin-laced techno-pop just <strong>works<strong>…not to mention the fact that the album contains a pretty awesome version of "White Bird." If you like violin-laced techno-pop, that is. :)_

_**Next time:** Lost in translation._

_And now…**Review replies!**_

_**JetravenEx:**__ Way to go, making me feel ancient. *laughs* No, I'm kidding. Really. Deteriorating body aside, I'm quite happy to be turning 47 in a couple of weeks. :) I would never, ever, EVER go back to being your age. And good on ya for liking the original _Knight Rider_. I haven't seen the reinvent, myself, but I probably will, eventually. When I get around to it. Anyway, I chose black hair for this Kitt as a nod to William Daniels, who has (or had, anyway, before it went grey) lovely black hair. And it's nice to carry over something black, too, which I'm going to guess is why the color is popular when people do this. But no red eyes, no. *laughs*_

_**RoyalGuardPuppy:** Well, I give characters heart attacks. Might as well give readers heart attacks, too. :) *performs CPR* And I've been (very slowly!) reading your translation, trying not to refer back to the original story while I'm trying to read it. It's amazing (in a not-good way) how much German I've forgotten… *sigh*_

_**Jalaperilo:** This fic was particularly fun for me precisely because I got to do YAY!RESEARCH! for it. So yeah, that results in detail in the fic, I'm afraid. Probably too much at times, but…Oh well! It doesn't help that, for this story, it's medical research that I get to do, since that stuff fascinates the holy hell out of me. Soooooo… It's no wonder I like doctor/medic characters so much. It's just not quite as much fun with Transformers characters because they don't have all the fun squishy-bleedy bits. _

_And yes, that character is a very formidable woman, and I've known a number of them IRL, too. They give you a "Well done!" and you're all like, "Yipes! Run away!" _

_**KatanaDoshi:** The medical stuff is…Well, it has a small, desperate foothold in reality, at least. *laughs* Well, OK, the smaller details are indeed realistic. It's just that the overriding concept is utterly impossible, especially so for the time in which this story is set. (However, experiments are currently being done with sticking computer chips into people's brains/bodies in order to take over functions that the person has lost for whatever reason, so…Yeah. We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. ;) ) In general, I get really stupid over accuracy, even just for a silly fanfic, although there are limits, of course, because there** is** such a thing as "creative license." So, there's a mixture of real and totally made up. I guess my goal is to give the story enough real/accurate detail to make it convincing enough for readers who aren't M.D.s to swallow the made-up stuff and the completely impossible overriding concept but without getting **too** bogged down in explanation. If I can strike that balance, I'm happy._

_And yes, I agree that if one is going to tackle this concept at all, then one should be willing to put effort into making it remotely believable. Otherwise, I tend to think that it won't do much for a reader. On the other hand…I suppose it does depend on one's motivation for humanizing Kitt. If one's goal is to have him quickly jump into bed with one's self-insert OC, then…Hey, why bother with the (perhaps literally) gory details, eh? *laughs* But that's not my motivation. _

_ALL that being said: **Thank you** for even attempting to read a story the general concept of which you're not fond. I'm very happy to hear that you're finding it enjoyable anyway, because that means that my evil plot is succeeding… ;)_

_**BlueBassist:** Yeah, it's been a while, so I can understand the confusion when you got the update notification. *laughs* But I'm glad it gave you an "Aw, yeah!" instead of an "Oh, no!" ;)_

_**Melody Phoenix:**__ But…but…the technical stuff is the FUN stuff! Well, OK, maybe you have to be weird like me to think that way. I grew up mostly in the 70s on a steady diet of _Emergency!_, both first-run and daily reruns in syndication. It was my favorite show, along with the original_ Star Trek, _and it (and _Star Trek, _actually) did bad things to me, since I watched it in my formative years. *laughs* Oddly, I never wanted to be a doctor or a nurse or any kind of medical practitioner, myself, because I didn't want that kind of responsibility, but I'm completely _fascinated_ by the stuff. I mean, I hang out in the library at the local hospital and read medical journals, for heaven's sake. For fun! So in the end...Some of the stuff in this story had to be researched, but some of it I actually __**did**__ already know. Of course, it also helps to have been hospitalized far too many times in my life, too, rather often in the ICU, so I've had my share of CV lines and arterial lines and the always-fun Foley catheters and chest tubes and blood transfusions and being intubated and… Well, yeah, if it's a medical thing that can be stuck into a human body, I've probably had it stuck in me at some point in time. *rolls eyes* Except maybe feeding tubes; I've never been THAT badly off. Yet. So, you pick things up in those situations, and those experiences make for better fic of this type, maybe. Hey, at least it's useful for __**something!**_

_**bluedragon1836:**__ Nope, the name isn't a _Doctor Who_ reference, I'm afraid. I've only ever seen a couple episodes of _Doctor Who_, and that was back in the 70s, so I have no real memories of the show, only remembering that it didn't really grab me at the time. (Science fiction often doesn't, which is strange since I am a big-time _Star Trek_ fan. But I guess I'm selective about the sci-fi I like.) So, chalk it up to complete coincidence. I just needed a Southern-sounding name, and that was what popped into my brain. Jessica's name is a deliberately "referential" one, though! But her name references _M*A*S*H_, not _Doctor Who.


	13. Chapter 13

_Oy. Sorry this took me a bit. Unfortunately, I have no surviving copies, old/ incomplete or otherwise, of this or of the next few chapters of the story. So, it's all a from-scratch reconstruction, which I have been working on, but since I do have something of a real life, it takes time. And it doesn't help that I also got distracted by another, totally unrelated, project. *sigh* But...here it is. And perhaps the good news is that the next chapter is almost done, too, so perhaps the wait won't be as long for it. :)_

_Annnnnnnd way back when I started posting this story, I mentioned that one of its five OCs is mostly dead. Which, of course, implies that he's not **completely** dead. And he isn't...sort of. (However, for any Monty Python fans out there, he isn't getting better, either. ;) ) In any case, in this chapter...Well, I wouldn't say that you get to meet him, per se, but you **do** learn something about him, with more to be revealed as the story progresses, of course. So without further ado...  
><em>

* * *

><p>"Oh, <em>fine<em>," Angelo announced, affronted, as he walked into Kitt's room. "Kitt wakes up, and no one bothers to _call me_? I had to hear about it from _Devon_? What am I? Chopped liver?"

"Yes," Michael succinctly answered while Jessica and Bonnie simultaneously hissed an annoyed and otherwise wordless "Shhhh!" at him.

Angelo was momentarily taken aback by their combined and very unexpected reaction, but he still asked, albeit with a reflexively lowered voice, "And what's with all the romantic candlelight?"

Rolling his eyes, Michael sighed and went off to quietly bring Angelo up to speed.

But the quiet exchange was enough to rouse Kitt. He was still lying on his left side, and as the sedative that Jessica had given him had started to wear off, he'd drawn his knees up into his chest, sighing almost contentedly as he had done so. And there he'd stayed. But as he heard the familiar voices and as the words that they were saying slowly began to register with him again, he managed to pull himself out of the fuzzy, drugged stupor in which he'd been languishing, and then further managed to make a noise. It was quiet enough that only Bonnie, who was closest to him, was able to hear it. And when she did, she instantly crouched down slightly at Kitt's bedside, so that she would have been eye-to-eye with him, had his eyes been open.

She murmured, quietly and very gently, "Kitt?"

Slowly, very slowly, Kitt opened his eyes. His gaze was at first drug-clouded and unfocused, but after a moment, he blinked once, again very slowly, and then he focused on Bonnie's face, in a way that he hadn't so far managed to focus on anything or anyone. Bonnie, encouraged, smiled at him and found herself having to resist a powerful and strongly maternal impulse to reach out and stroke his cheek affectionately. Instead, she said to him, softly and tentatively, "Hey, sweetheart."

Kitt didn't answer, only blinked again…and then he grimaced reflexively, drew in a sudden, sharp breath, and then squeezed his eyes tightly shut again as his entire body tensed. He was clearly in pain, and he lifted his right hand to press it against the side of his head. All of it made Bonnie wince, and when Kitt whimpered quietly, wordlessly, Bonnie lifted her head to look at Jessica. For the moment, she wasn't paying attention to Kitt and was instead watching with amusement, her arms folded over her chest, as Michael talked to Angelo, relaying to him recent events.

"Jess?" Bonnie quietly prompted, wanting to get her attention but not wanting to speak too loudly, for Kitt's sake. And as Jessica turned to look over her shoulder at the other woman and her face registered instant comprehension as she took in the scene that was playing out behind her, Bonnie rather unnecessarily said to her, "He's still in pain."

"I can fix that," Jessica quietly answered, and she pulled a syringe out of the deep pocket of the pink sweatshirt jacket that she was wearing over her scrub shirt. She'd preloaded it with a moderate extra dose of pain medication in anticipation of Kitt needing it, enough to dull pain but not enough to make him unnecessarily stupid, much less unconscious. She set about slowly pushing the contents of the syringe into the injection port of one of his peripheral IV lines. When she was finished, she gave Bonnie a reassuring look and said, "That should kick in in a couple of minutes."

And it did. Two minutes later, Kitt's body relaxed, his heart rate settled, and the hand that he'd had pressing against the side of his head fell away, coming to rest in front of his face. He murmured a sound that clearly indicated relief and, after a moment, he determinedly pushed himself over onto his back; he'd slowly realized that his left hip seemed to be protesting now against having to bear his weight. Pain flashed through his head as he moved, but it was distant, dulled, a mere shadow of its former self, and he sighed in relief, floated in that happy place for a long and blissful moment…and then opened his eyes again.

The room was dim, lit only by a dozen or so candles scattered haphazardly around, sitting on any available flat surface. Thick blankets had been employed to block the light from the windows and the French doors, and Kitt was thankful for it. He could remember, dimly, his first awakening, and the light, even as briefly exposed to it as he had been, had been downright painful. But even in the dimness, the four familiar faces around him were clearly recognizable, and he looked at each of them in turn, slowly focusing on them.

And then, impatient as always, Michael unceremoniously plunked himself down onto the edge of the bed but, so Kitt noticed, he was careful not to make any physical contact. Which, of course, wasn't all that difficult; the body that he was wearing, while not especially short as male bodies went, was almost devoid of flesh. It was a skeleton and a collection of internal organs wrapped in a thin and dangerously fragile veneer of skin. There was almost nothing else to him, and he didn't take up nearly as much room in the bed as a human male of his height should. All of it nagged at Kitt's innate and rather wide streak of vanity, but it wasn't as if there was anything that he could do about it.

Michael, meanwhile, was smiling at him. And he said, cheerfully but with his voice distinctly lowered from its normal speaking volume, not far above a whisper, "Hey, pal. What's the news, huh?"

Kitt just looked at him, expressionlessly; the mechanics required to produce facial expressions were, for the moment, out of his grasp. And, again, he desperately wanted to say something to Michael. To anyone. He took a breath, and he opened his mouth, irrationally hoping that words would just come out without his having to think about forming them, just as he was breathing and his heart was beating and his body was metabolizing and all sorts of other things were going on without his having to think about any of it. _And_ without being able to monitor any of it, either, which he found to be rather disconcerting.

Unfortunately, as he'd of course known, speech wasn't one of the human body's autonomic functions, and the only sound that came out of him was a cough, one that seemed to feed on itself so that it quickly became deep, wracking, and frighteningly uncontrollable. It seemed to Kitt as if an eternity passed before he was able to catch his breath again, and even once he did, he could only slump against the raised head of the bed, suddenly exhausted. He just lay there, breathing hard, his eyes closed again…until someone nudged him. The touch was ever so gentle, but to Kitt it was nothing less than startling, and he gasped, his eyes flying wide open.

Michael was leaning over him, the others apparently having backed off a bit during his coughing fit, probably so as not to overwhelm him. Michael's expression was apologetic, and he murmured, "Sorry, buddy. I know the touching thing is weird and new and all, but…" And then he offered a cup to Kitt and said, "Here." And when Kitt just blinked at him wordlessly and blankly, he added, "It's ice chips. You, uh…You put them in your mouth and you suck on them. It'll help with the dry throat," he explained.

Kitt blinked again, and his expression started to convey a bit of the curious confusion that he was feeling. He had no idea if his throat was dry or not because he had no idea what it was supposed to feel like, but he trusted that, in this case, Michael knew best. Tentatively, he lifted his left arm so that he could take the cup that Michael was offering to him. It took him a couple of tries; the whole limb shook weakly, uncontrollably, and his eye/hand coordination apparently wasn't quite up to snuff yet because his aim was off, but eventually he made contact and took the cold plastic cup from Michael. He bit down unconsciously on his lower lip, and his brow furrowed as regarded the cup in his hand. For a moment, he was simply fascinated by the new and alien sensation of cold, and then he lifted the cup to his lips. And Michael was right; the water from the melted ice did make his throat feel much better. He looked at Michael, trying to make his face convey gratitude, and he must have at least marginally succeeded because Michael grinned widely at him and said, "You're welcome. So," he added, "how are you doing? Are you OK? What—?"

His voice broke off as Kitt just looked at him. He was quickly getting the hang of expressions, Michael noticed, because the look that Kitt gave him had a distinct hint of mournful apology to it.

"What?" Michael asked again, his own expression starting to pull into a worried frown.

Frustration, an emotion all too familiar to him, welled up, and Kitt opened his mouth again…but then closed it in surrender, acknowledging the futility of the effort, at least for now. He couldn't speak, plain and simple. Even though humans, once they learned to speak, could do it without thinking about it, the mechanics involved with forming spoken words were actually very complex. And although it deeply frustrated him, especially because the words that he wanted to say came so easily into his mind, Kitt knew that being able to speak at all, much less mastering the ability, would take some time, even for him.

But in the meantime… Maybe…

While he and Michael had been interacting, Jessica had drifted over to Kitt's bedside again. She wasn't looking at him, at either of them, and she wasn't paying attention to what Michael was saying, intending to give the two of them time to catch up a bit without any intrusion from her. So she was instead fiddling with some of the many various machines and monitors that surrounded Kitt, and as she silently moved about her tasks, Kitt noticed muted light catch and then glint off of something metal in the breast pocket of the scrub shirt that she was wearing. There were several metal somethings there, in fact. Several _useful_ metal somethings. Almost before he realized that he was doing it, Kitt reached out toward her, unsteadily. Unfortunately, his aim was still off.

"Don't go feeling up your doctor now, buddy. She's a married woman, you know," Michael quipped, a quip that was immediately chased by a sharp, "Ow!" when Bonnie, who'd drifted over to stand next to him, punched him none-too-gently in the shoulder.

Meanwhile, Jessica was becoming aware of the conversation, and she turned toward Kitt. She frowned at him questioningly, and then she suddenly realized exactly what he'd been reaching for. She pulled out one of the array of multicolored pens – a few of them shiny metal, indeed – that she habitually collected and then hoarded in the breast pocket of her scrub shirt and offered it to him.

"Is this what you want, Kitt?" she asked him quietly, and she got her answer when he nodded jerkily, the movement completely unfamiliar to him, and then unsteadily and uncertainly wrapped his hand around the pen that she offered to him, awkwardly clutching it in his fist in exactly the way that a two-year-old child might grasp a crayon. He stared at the instrument for a long moment, and then he blinked and lifted his head. Squinting hard even in the room's dim lighting, he began to look around for the other half of the equation.

Bonnie, catching on, immediately moved toward the couch that was in the room. She'd been working on the problem of the invasive subroutine while she'd waited for Kitt to wake up again, and she'd left the thick stack of computer printouts that she'd been working with, all diagnostic reports from the Trans Am's hardware, on that couch. Now, she tore one sheet off the stack with the intention of handing it to Kitt, but she paused in mid-motion, frowning. With a murmured "Wait," she abruptly went out into the hall, returning a moment later with an over-sized hardcover book, to press on. She handed that and the paper to Kitt with a quiet, "Here you go, sweetheart."

The words that he wanted to say flooded Kitt's mind as he took the book and the paper from Bonnie, his movements becoming quickly steadier. He gave Bonnie what he hoped was a grateful look and then contemplated the blank paper in front of him. The image of the letters that comprised the words that he wanted to say flashed there as well, and somehow, in a way that for the moment he didn't even attempt to comprehend, he knew how to write them, too, how to form each of the letters. Without really thinking about it, he shifted the pen to his left hand, grasping it in a way that was more appropriate for writing, and then he set about scrawling the words that were burning brightly in his mind, carefully translating each letter to the paper in the pen's bright purple ink. He did so very slowly and extremely awkwardly, not having had the chance to master fine motor control yet, certainly not to the level necessary to write neatly_._

Even though he kept the message very brief, finishing the few words that he wanted to say took him a while. It was an unacceptably long while, as far as Kitt was concerned, but it wasn't as if he had any alternative. When he did finish, Michael leaned in, intensely curious, to see what he'd written. And then he scowled and lifted his gaze to give Kitt a look that spoke of nothing but perplexed confusion mixed with a strong dose of "Have you lost your mind?" The latter was an expression of Michael's with which Kitt was all too familiar, since it was one often aimed at him.

"_What_?" Michael asked of Kitt, clearly baffled.

In response, Kitt only frowned back at Michael for a moment before looking down again at the words that he'd written, considering them critically. He had to admit that the words were messily formed, scrawled and shaky, the individual letters that comprised them inappropriately blocky and unevenly-sized but uniformly much too large, as if he was a child just learning how to write…which, in a sense, was exactly what he was. But he also knew that the words weren't _entirely_ illegible, and he couldn't begin to understand why Michael apparently couldn't read them. His brow unconsciously creasing in confused uncertainty, he looked back up at Michael.

And then Angelo, after blinking for a very long and very surprised moment at what Kitt had written, spoke up for the first time since Kitt had awakened.

"He said that he can't speak," he announced, bemused. "Except that he said it…or wrote it, whatever…in Russian."

Kitt blinked at that, surprised. He jerked his head around to level a still-confused look at Angelo…and then he winced at the pain that lanced through his head in the wake of the quick, reflexive movement. It was sharp enough to easily pierce the dulling effects of the pain meds, and he grimaced at it as he awkwardly scrawled, _Что?_

"You're writing in Russian, Kitt," Angelo calmly answered him. And then, as Kitt just blinked blankly up at him, Angelo added, "And, y'know, don't take this as a complaint or nothin', but…um, _why_?"

Kitt bit his lip and then shook his head slightly, and he began to write, each letter a little less laborious and requiring a bit less concentration than the one before it had required, _Я не знаю._

"_Wait_ a minute!" Michael interrupted, flabbergasted and staring wide-eyed at Angelo, who was standing across the bed from him_. "_You speak Russian? _You_?"

"Yeah, I do," Angelo answered with a flippant grin. And when Michael only blinked dumbly at him in response, he shrugged and added, "Hey, I admit that I was completely useless in school, all right? But I always kinda liked languages. It probably helped that I already spoke three before I started school…"

Meanwhile, ignoring Michael and Angelo, Jessica unceremoniously but carefully hitched one thigh up onto the edge of the bed that Michael wasn't sitting on. She leaned forward to give Kitt a searching look.

"But you obviously understand us when we speak to you in English?" she quietly asked him. She already knew the answer to the question because even though he was doing so in a different language, he was responding in entirely proper context to everything that was being said to him. Which, given what she'd done to the brain to which he was connected, was very welcome news. But she still felt a strange need for confirmation, anyway.

Kitt nodded, still rather jerkily, as he stared in mute confusion tinged with what might have been a bit of fear at her. Michael, meanwhile, looked up at Bonnie and quietly said to her, "I thought you told me he doesn't have his language database."

"He doesn't," Bonnie confirmed.

Michael frowned at that and then countered, "Well, Dr. Frankenstein, _obviously_ an entire language tagged along that you somehow managed not to notice."

"Nothing tagged along," Bonnie answered him after giving him a quick, annoyed glare. She shook her head with deep conviction and added, "I'm certain of that."

"Then do you wanna tell us why he's—" Michael began to ask, before Jessica interrupted him.

"Oh yes, he _does_ have a language database," she said quietly. She was still staring at Kitt, and she smiled at him reassuringly as she added, "It's just not the one y'all're thinking of, Bonnie."

Bonnie blinked at Jessica in momentary confusion…and then the light quickly dawned.

"He's Russian," she murmured.

Kitt blinked up at Bonnie at that, his face registering something like surprise, and Jessica nodded mutely while Michael immediately protested, "Kitt is _not_ Russian."

"_Kitt_ isn't, no," Bonnie clarified. "But _he_ is. Or…was," she added, gesturing at Kitt's body, trying to convey that she was speaking of the original inhabitant of that body rather than of Kitt himself. She angled a glance at Jessica for confirmation of her sudden theory and asked, "Right?"

"It's the only thing that makes any kind of sense to me," Jessica answered, with a shrug that still had a touch of uncertainty about it before she added, "Part of what I was able to salvage of his cerebral cortex was at least part of what we believe to be its language center. I…guess this confirms that thinking. For whatever reason, it appears to be still working in at least some capacity, _and_ it seems to have priority over the…technology. At least for now."

"Fabulous," Michael muttered. "_Fascinating_, even." He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned forward a little in order to lock his gaze urgently with Kitt's. "But you said that you understand English, right?"

Kitt gave him a look that easily conveyed irritation – He was getting much better at expressions very quickly – and then he laboriously wrote, _Я понимаю его намного лучше чем ты._

Once Kitt was finished, Michael frowned and looked up questioningly at Angelo, who snickered and then translated, "He said, and I quote, 'I understand it much better than you do.'"

Michael looked back at Kitt then, quirking a grin at him. He was strangely comforted by the obvious smugness behind the words because _that_ was definitely Kitt talking. It was, as far as Michael was concerned, the first bit of concrete proof that it really was Kitt in there, that he was, after everything that had happened to him, more or less all right. Or at least that the would be all right, eventually.

"Well then," he asked reasonably, in the affectionately argumentative tone that they often used when mercilessly picking on each other, "why aren't you _writing_ in English, O Great Master of the English Language?"

_Я не знаю! Я не понимаю! _Kitt immediately answered, and he scowled ferociously and all unconsciously as he scribbled the words, a process that was also becoming obviously easier for him. He even went back and underlined the words multiple times in deep and emphatic frustration.

"He doesn't know, and he doesn't understand," Angelo quietly translated.

And Jessica, with a suddenly far-away look on her face mused, "But I think _I_ do." She aimed an ironic smile over at Michael then and added, "And even though you were being sarcastic, Michael, you're absolutely right. It _is_ fascinating…"

Four sets of curious eyes came to rest on her then, as her voice trailed off. It took her a moment to notice them, as lost as she quickly became in her own thoughts and theorizing, but once she did notice them, she sighed and tried to explain.

"Communicating in and understanding spoken language is an entirely different process from communicating in and understanding written language," she said. "Human beings were communicating in sounds and then in words and formal languages long before any written language was developed."

"So?" Michael prompted when her voice trailed off in thought again.

Jessica smirked at him and continued, "So although the processes are linked, they're not the _same _process. And, really, neither is fully understood, but we _do_ know where the brain processes speech, both to create it and to understand what other people say. And _you_," she said specifically to Kitt, "don't have that part anymore. But y'all're understanding what's being said in English here, so the technological equivalent of a speech center that you have and that's linked to English _is_ obviously working. Sooooo…I'm going to guess that you haven't figured out how to make the various organic structures produce spoken words just yet. Yes?"

_Точно! _Kitt wrote. He slumped back against the head of the bed, sighing without thinking about it as he did so. He was profoundly relieved – but, really, not at all surprised – that Jessica had easily and accurately deduced his problem.

"Precisely," Angelo murmured at Jessica as she looked up at him questioningly.

Jessica nodded and continued, "So, logically, he goes for writing instead. The mechanics of doing so are stored in the cerebellum, which he still has, but it's all the, um, original owner's. And its initial impulse – the _only_ pathway that it has available, really – is to hook up with the language center that it's always accessed. Which is _also_ the original owner's."

"And the original owner," Bonnie concluded, "is…_was_, whatever…Russian."

"Yup," Jessica succinctly answered. "And it appears that he _wasn't_ bilingual. The good news is that once Kitt _does_ figure out the mechanics of talking, English should be the go-to language. But until then…?" Her voice trailed off into a shrug.

"Until then," Angelo finished with a grin aimed down at Kitt, "I've got myself a new job, don't I, baby?"

_Я вне себя от радости, _Kitt wrote, his face conveying a sour look.

Angelo smirked at what he'd written and at the look on his face, and he sarcastically cooed back at him, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love you, too."

Meanwhile, Jessica leaned toward Kitt again in intense and curious fascination, and she asked, "So tell me: Are you _thinking_ in English or in Russian…?"

And the questions went on from there, Jessica asking, Kitt answering with increasingly rapid writing proficiency, Angelo translating, and Michael and Bonnie generally watching but occasionally asking, too. The questions continued until Kitt, exhausted, suddenly and without warning crashed into sleep.

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><p><em><strong>Next time:<strong> Mangia!  
><em>

_I should note here that Russian is not my native language, nor am I at all fluent in it. However, I **am** a huge, dorky fan of the language. Which, of course, is one of the reasons – but, really, **not** the main reason – why I chose it. ;) So, being only a beginning/intermediate-level speaker at best, whether or not the little that I wrote above is 100% correct is very much open to question, particularly since I am completely unfamiliar with more colloquial Russian. I do know that what I wrote is all spelled correctly, at least, but as far as the declensions and cases and conjugations and proper pronoun usage and correct syntax and appropriate word choice and all that...Yeah, not 100% guaranteed to be correct. :) For this reason, as well as for simple practicality's sake (For one thing, constantly changing the keyboard from Roman to Cyrillic and back again **and** remembering which key is what letter when the keyboard's in Cyrillic mode is a pain in the booty), this is pretty much the only chapter that will contain actual Russian written in Cyrillic. Going forward, it'll either be transliterated or, much more often, you'll just have to use your imagination._

_That said, if any native (or at least more-fluent-than-me) speaker of Russian should happen to run across and actually read this silly little story, please feel free to yell at me to correct **anything** that I wrote in this chapter or that I will write in future chapters. *laughs* Please **do** shoot me a review or a PM with corrections, and I will duly correct. I soooooo want to learn more Russian, but my resources are, alas, sadly limited._

_Finally, thanks to The Moody Blues, particularly their "Long Distance Voyager" album from '81, for my "soundtrack" for reconstructing this chapter. :) I'm afraid the Moodies are totally "Angelo music," since he's such a damned hippie. *laughs*_

_That said…**Review replies!**_

_**Melody Phoenix: **Medical knowledge **is** fun to have. It's especially fun because you can talk to doctors intelligently and translate their jargon for them, which shocks the hell out of them, and shocking people is fun. :) It's kinda like how, if you're a woman and you know how cars work, you can shock the hell out of mechanics. *laughs* Unfortunately, from here on out, the medical stuff fades in importance. I'd dearly love to spend more time on it, but the story's long enough as it is without getting totally bogged down in that stuff._

_**Jetraven Ex:** No, you don't want to have been born in the 80s; you want to have been born in the 70s or, preferably, the mid-60s, like me. Besides the fact that you wouldn't have to deal with being 16 right now (I remember the drama well), you would have been able to truly **enjoy** the 80s as a mostly-grown-up. Ahhhhh, the good old days, yes… *sigh* But no, I don't feel ancient, actually. I love being my age, really. Which is funny because, when I was in my teens and 20s, I totally feared being in my 40s. *laughs* But anyway…_

_**Jalaperilo:** Learning, yes! Mostly of stuff that we just take for granted, naturally. That's the fun of an "alien" perspective. And I totally agree that there's no such thing as too much detail…but not everyone shares our opinion, I fear. :)_

_**RoyalGuardPuppy:** Reading the translation has jogged my memory of German quite a bit! I hope that you'll continue it, but I can totally understanding how it would be difficult and time-consuming and all that. :) And I imagine that this chapter, since it contains another language, would only complicate things further. And yeah, hold off on the Kitt hugs, at least for the moment. But in the future… ;)_

_**KatanaDoshi: **Yes, I actually did some reading about stroke recovery, since I've never personally interacted with a recovering stroke victim. The situation is not entirely analogous – The technology and the other made-up stuff makes things much easier on that front, which was of course deliberate on my part – but there are definite parallels there. And I did **definitely** want to give Kitt some hurdles. Some impairments, if you will. Speech difficulty seemed like a logical one to give him, since verbal language is something that's actually quite complex, even though it doesn't seem like it is to us, and that would, yes, be completely foreign to him. Synthesizing speech is totally not the same process as forming it with our various organic structures, and in the stories that I've looked at that involved this idea, the notion of Kitt being able to talk right away bugged me because I don't think it would be so. I think he'd learn quickly, yes, but to just be able to do it immediately, without some kind of justification for the ability...no. So, although I don't have the luxury of addressing everything that I'd **like** to address in the story (Maybe I'll write a few "outtakes." ;) ), I did very much want to address that issue._

_*laughs* Potty-training the Trans Am, indeed. Right now, he's got it oh-so-easy. Ah, sweet, sweet Foley catheters. *laughs* And he hasn't eaten yet so there's nothing else to get rid of. But eventually… *snicker*_

_And I'm glad that the previous chapter made you think. I take that as a very high compliment. It's my belief that even a story that's "just" fanfiction does well to require some cerebral involvement from the reader. (Well, unless it's flat-out pr0n, of course. ;) ) In any case, I hope that the story will continue to make you think. :)_

_**Emperatrizdelanoche: **Nope, no matter what body you stick Kitt in, he **isn't** human. And, really, he never will be. And, for me, that's fun. He's an individual who, for the moment, looks like a human but who has a completely "alien" perspective on things. So I guess that's kind of why I felt drawn to this idea in general. It's been done before, of course, but like you said generally he ends up being portrayed as just another human and he takes to the transition as a duck takes to water, as they say. Nothing against the folks who wrote those stories, but I really, **truly**, don't think that's how it would be. So many things that we take for granted – like sensation, for just one thing – would be utterly foreign and, at least at first, quite upsetting to him, I think, in the sense that he wouldn't know how to process it. And that, in turn, would generate things like fear and confusion and a whole lot of discomfort and distaste, especially at first. So, I wanted to address that. I'm glad that you appreciate it and that you're continuing to read. Gracias! :)_

_In fact, thanks to all of you who are reading and continuing to fave/alert/comment. I do very much appreciate it. :)_


	14. Chapter 14

_*sticks in head sheepishly* Well, here's the next chapter. And it only took me what? Months? But I moved out of my little apartment and into an awesome house which I'm renting. So, instead of being a 40 minute drive from town, I'm a 5 minute drive from town now. And it has a washer/dryer, so no more laundromats! And I've got 8 acres and an absolutely __**gorgeous**__ view. So, next spring, I's gettin' me some chickens, man. :D_

_However, it took me a bit to get my computer crap set up and to get some Internets going here, but I finally disciplined myself to sit down and finish reconstructing this chapter of this story, so…Here it is. And it's a nice long one, too, for those of you who still might be paying attention to this story. Consider it a "reward" for your patience. :) And some review replies are below, just 'cuz. So without further ado..._

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><p>Michael poked his head into the lab and took a quick look around, but he didn't immediately see the person that he was seeking. Only a few people were milling about the large lab, at the moment, but they all looked quietly busy, and he felt no need to disturb whatever it was that they were working on in order to ask after his quarry. Instead, he called out quietly into the room, "Hey, Bon?"<p>

Just as quietly, from over in a corner that had been hidden from view by the open door, Bonnie answered, "Over here, Michael."

Nodding to himself for no particular reason, Michael walked all the way into the rather sterile room and quickly made his way to the corner workstation at which Bonnie was sitting. He settled himself on the corner of the desk, watching as Bonnie frowned ferociously at the screen in front of her, across which thousands of tiny characters were scrolling rapid-fire, all of it complete gibberish to Michael. After a moment, the screen froze, and then Bonnie felt free to turn her attention to Michael.

"How's Kitt this morning?" she asked of him.

Michael shrugged, folding his arms over his chest at the same time.

"He fell asleep on me again," he answered, his expression hovering somewhere between an exasperated frown and a fond smile. "In the middle of a sentence, no less," he added. "It's a very bad habit he's developed over the past…what?...Four days now?"

Bonnie smiled back at him as she replied, "He can't help it that he's being pumped full of Valium so that he doesn't have seizures. Either that, or I guess he just hasn't figured out sleepy signals yet."

Michael snorted and retorted, "Oh, he's figured them out, all right. He's just damned determined to believe that they don't apply to him. Stubborn as a mule."

Bonnie smirked up at him and answered, "I wonder who he got that from?"

Michael smirked right back at Bonnie and shot back, "I was just about to say the same thing to you." And then, sobering suddenly, he shrugged and added, "Other than that, he's…unhappy. Homesick. Bored out of his little stapled-together skull."

Bonnie grimaced at that.

"I suppose it isn't surprising," she said. "He's used to having the world at his proverbial fingertips to keep him entertained, but now…?"

"Now he's as un-godlike and bored as the rest of us," Michael finished. "He'd be climbing the walls if he could be, I think, and I can't say that I blame him. You know what it's like, being stuck in a hospital bed."

"Actually, I don't," Bonnie said as she aimed a dazzling smile up at Michael. "I've never been in one, at least not as an inpatient."

"Well, lucky you, then," Michael answered with a mirroring smile. "Because it sucks." And then as Bonnie chuckled at that he sobered again and added, "But you didn't ask me down here so that you could ask me about Kitt." When Bonnie just raised a questioning eyebrow at him in response, he elaborated, "If you'd really wanted to know about Kitt, you'd've just gone up there and seen him. Which, by the way, you _should_ do. He's been asking after you."

"I know," Bonnie answered, with a vigorous nod. "And I will. But I had a brainstorm yesterday and now I've finally decrypted this stupid thing," she said, contemptuously jerking her chin at the code frozen on the screen in front of her.

Michael frowned at the rather unexpected news, not so much because the news was unexpected, but more because of Bonnie's demeanor in light of it. He knew that the invasive program's encryption had been driving her crazy. She'd said that if they could just decrypt it, if she could actually look at it and rip into it and dissect its code, they'd have a much better idea of how it was able to do what it had been doing before they'd moved Kitt out of harm's way and then, also, how to get rid of it. That she hadn't been able to decrypt it had been severely frustrating her. So, Michael would have thought that decrypting the program would have made Bonnie a very happy geek, that she'd be bouncing off the walls and doing some kind of cutely goofy victory dance. But she didn't look happy at all, and she certainly wasn't doing any bouncing, much less any dancing. In fact, she didn't look as if she was feeling anything in particular, really, which was puzzling because she usually felt no need to hide her feelings about anything. Or about anyone, as Michael had quickly discovered.

"And?" Michael prompted.

In response to the prompt, Bonnie scowled and pushed herself to her feet, standing up with enough force that her chair nearly toppled over behind her. She paced for a while then, back and forth, thinking. And then she stopped and looked squarely at Michael. It was then that Michael noticed what he hadn't noticed before: She'd schooled the expression on her face to careful neutrality, but her eyes were dark with a seething fury that she was obviously trying, desperately, to hold back. It looked to Michael as if her control over it was set to crack wide open at any moment.

"What?" Michael prompted, his tone more urgently concerned this time. "Decrypting the stupid thing is good. Right? Yes? No? Maybe?"

Bonnie continued her pacing then, heaving a long sigh.

"Yes and no," she answered, and as Michael gave her a puzzled looked in response to the ambiguous answer, she elaborated, "It's good because now that I can actually look at the code, I can figure out how the thing works. And, theoretically, I could have figured out how to get rid of it."

"_Could_ have figured out?" Michael echoed, both eyebrows rising with concern.

Bonnie smiled humorlessly and answered, "To make a very long story short, the only way to get rid of it is to scrap all the hardware and rebuild it from scratch and then reinstall it, which is just…" She rolled her eyes, which eloquently conveyed the scope of the task that the techs now faced. "I mean, don't get me wrong. It's a hellish amount of work, but it's actually good to know that that's what we need to do so that we can just get on with doing it. But on the other hand..."

"Yes?" Michael prompted yet again when she lapsed into a silence that lasted longer than he liked.

Bonnie completed a couple more pacing laps around the vicinity of her workstation before she stilled and faced Michael again. She'd reined in the fury a little, he could tell, but it was still there, entirely noticeable to anyone who knew her well enough. And Michael knew her very well. She was quiet for a moment longer, but then she finally spoke.

"You know, in some ways," she announced, "computer programming is an art."

Michael blinked; what she'd said wasn't at all what he'd expected her to say, and her tone was far milder that he'd expected it to be, given the rage that was still burning quietly in her eyes.

"OK," he managed to say uncertainly, the word much more of a question than a statement. "In that case, I'd say that Kitt is your _magnum opus_," he added.

Bonnie smiled thinly at that, but the smile didn't come close to touching her furious eyes.

"He certainly is," she answered. "But what I'm saying is that, just like with, say, master painters, every high-level programmer tends to develop their own style, something instantly recognizable that identifies their work, like signing a painting. So, if you know a programmer's work well enough, you can instantly recognize their style, just like an art expert can instantly identify a painting by Picasso even if there's no signature on it."

Michael gave Bonnie a speculative and narrow-eyed look, biting down into his lower lip as a light began to dawn. He jerked his head at the computer screen that was sitting next to him on the desk, and he said, "You know who programmed this thing."

It really wasn't a question, and even if it had been, the look that Bonnie gave him was the only answer that he needed. And, again, Michael was surprised. He would have thought that knowing the programmer's identity would have made her happy, too. It certainly made him happy to have a clue, to have some direction in which to move, to be able to take some action and make himself feel marginally useful again. But again, Bonnie didn't look happy at all. She inhaled deeply and then flopped back down into her chair before she slowly released the deep breath that she had taken in. She stared at the computer screen in front of her as she did all of that. She stared silently at the screen for a very long while, in fact.

"I'm very familiar with their work," she finally hedged, her voice barely above a whisper. "So…Yes, I do know the person who wrote it. I know them quite well, in fact." She leaned forward then, rummaging through the chaos of papers and folders and computer disks and print-outs that littered the desk's surface until she found what she was seeking: A plain, unlabeled manila folder that didn't seem to hold much, so far as Michael could see. She sat back in her chair and thoughtfully tapped the edge of the folder against her other hand for a moment before she handed the folder to Michael with a look of angry warning in her eyes. "And so do you," she added very quietly.

Frowning with morbid curiosity, Michael took the folder from Bonnie and opened it. He read the first few lines on the first of the few papers that the folder contained, at the same time seeing the photograph that was paper-clipped to the inside of the folder. His head jerked up, and his wide-eyed gaze met Bonnie's. A long look full of meaning that didn't require words passed between them. And then Michael, without another word, jerked to his feet and stormed out of the room, his eyes and all of his body language blazing with barely-contained fury.

Bonnie watched him leave. For a moment, she felt sorry for his quarry…but only for a very short moment. And then she went back to her mountain of work.

* * *

><p><em>So how is Trix?<em> Kitt asked. In Russian, of course.

"Trix" was the name that he, Angelo, Peter, and sometimes even Michael used to refer to the Trans Am, whenever it was necessary to differentiate the car from the artificial intelligence who called it home. Peter swore up and down that the car was female because it could be, in his words, "a flaming bitch " at times. It also didn't help that Michael often absently referred to the car as a "her." So, it had seemed only natural to give the car a name, one separate from Kitt's own and female, if only so that the car could be called something other than "the car" or "the Trans Am" or "this temperamental pain in the ass that you live in." Angelo, long ago, had one day announced out of the blue that "Trixie" was an appropriate name, and eventually the name had stuck. Amongst those who used it at all, it was usually shortened just to "Trix."

Angelo had himself settled on the edge of Kitt's bed, and he glanced down at the words that Kitt had written on one of the pages of the notebook he'd been given for just that purpose. Smiling at Kitt, he answered, "Aw, Trix ain't the same without you on board, baby. You know that." Kitt smiled faintly, tentatively at that as Angelo went on to add, "Although the Brain Brigade did manage to figure out how to get all that programming crap outta her." Kitt's head jerked up at that, and his expression immediately morphed into one of surprised but deep hopefulness. The expression was endearing enough that it almost broke Angelo's heart to have to add a qualifying, "Well, sort of."

Kitt instantly frowned at that, his brow furrowing deeply, and Angelo took a moment to marvel at how well Kitt had figured out the use of expressions in such a short amount of time. And it was a blessing, really. He could only directly communicate in words with Angelo and even then only in writing. Although writing, too, had become much easier for him, it was still a far more cumbersome means of communication than simply speaking. On the other hand, he could say so much so easily and so quickly now with just the expression on his face, or with body language, or especially with his pretty, long-lashed hazel eyes that seemed positively huge in his skeletal face. He was completely unguarded that way. Every thought that crossed his mind and every emotion that he experienced telegraphed plainly onto his face and into his gestures. He was like a small child that way; he didn't yet see any reason to conceal what he was thinking and feeling, nor would he have known how to do so even if he had wanted to. So if one knew how to read such things, Kitt was a completely open book, at least for now, and Angelo was a master at reading people. He had always been that way, not so much with Kitt because Kitt had never been able to give off such physical cues before, but with people in general.

Michael was having some difficulty, though. Normally, he could detect even the slightest nuances of Kitt's mood just by listening to the often extremely subtle changes in his voice, changes that no one else would ever notice. As a result, over the last few years, Michael had become very adept at determining other people's states of mind by their voice alone as well, so that, now, he'd become more attuned to auditory cues than to visual ones in general, not just when it came to Kitt. But at the moment, Kitt was denied a voice, and Michael was not used to interpreting him visually. On top of that, they weren't even speaking the same language, so a private conversation between the two of them was impossible. It was awkward, and it was causing a certain level of uncomfortable strain between them, and there hadn't been awkwardness or discomfort between them in years. That, in turn, was making things worse for Kitt, who was simply not adapting well to his current situation, on many different levels. He was frustrated. He was bored. He was frightened. He was overwhelmed, and not in a good way. He was disoriented and dislocated and disconnected and, in a way, far more isolated and alone than he had ever been. More than anything, he wanted to go home, where everything was familiar and where everything made sense, but he also knew that he couldn't do that. Perhaps, he wouldn't be able to do so for a long time to come.

For the moment, Angelo had nothing better to do, so he was spending as much time with Kitt as he could, if only to give him someone that he could actually "talk" to directly and privately. He was also trying to do whatever he could to help Kitt adapt, to make him see that his current situation, however long it ultimately lasted, might actually have some good things going for it, maybe even a few enjoyable advantages here and there.

Hence, his overall and as-yet-unrevealed mission here this very evening.

Kitt, meanwhile, had grown impatient with Angelo's sudden reverie. He'd already written, _What do you mean by 'sort of?,' _and he was rather insistently nudging Angelo's leg with one bony knee in order to get his attention. Angelo jumped slightly at the unexpected contact – Kitt didn't usually initiate such things – and then he saw the impatiently demanding look on Kitt's face. He glanced down to read what Kitt had asked…and then he heaved a long sigh. He knew that Kitt wasn't going to be happy with what he was about to say, but he also knew that it had to be said.

"As it turns out," he answered, "the only way to get rid of the thing is to rip all the hardware outta Trix and then rebuild it all from scratch, which could take… Well, uh…months. So you're just gonna have to batten down the hatches and sit tight in there, baby."

Kitt just blinked at Angelo dully for a moment, for a moment refusing to believe what he'd just heard. But the words were undeniable in the end. _Months in here, _eventuallyran through Kitt's mind._ At the very least._ As the thought crossed Kitt's mind, his expression morphed again, and he speared Angelo with a look that was so jumbled that Angelo couldn't separate the component emotions that had caused it. At a loss for helpful or comforting words, he fell back on his usual tactic.

"What?" Angelo grimly teased. "You're not having fun in there?"

Kitt's expression instantly transformed into a scowl, and he clenched his pen in his left fist. Once he put it to paper, a savage flow of angry Russian practically exploded out of it.

_Fun?_ he wrote furiously. _Fun?! I can't speak. In fact, I can't communicate at all with anyone except for you because the only language that this brain I'm stuck in can communicate in is one that no one but you speaks. I'm stuck in this bed and it's driving me absolutely crazy. I can process less than half of what I perceive, and the rest of it gives me a massive headache. And then there's the whole—_

Angelo watched Kitt write for a while, watched him pressing the pen against the paper hard enough that his knuckles went dead white. He watched him go back and underline a few of the words he'd written for emphasis, with enough force to tear the paper. He watched the expression on his face, a fierce mixture of anger, frustration, and not a little fear, all of which he'd kept bottled up for a few days now. He was suddenly breathing hard, as if he'd just finished sprinting a mile, and as Angelo glanced at the monitors that were keeping close tabs on Kitt's physical condition, he saw that his heart rate had skyrocketed to match, as anger-fueled adrenaline poured into his system. Knowing that such an emotional release was good for Kitt but concerned about him overtaxing himself in his still-fragile condition, Angelo reached out and loosely wrapped a hand around his left forearm. He did so very gently, mindful of Kitt's physical delicacy. The knobby bones of his wrist looked as if they would happily burst right through his thin, pale skin with very little provocation, and Angelo could easily feel both of the bones in his forearm.

Kitt sucked in a gasp as contact was made, and his frantically-written rant immediately halted, mid-word. He knew that he needed to get used to being touched, especially if he was going to be living in the body in which he was caged for months, but he also knew, now, that that was easier said than done. And it was frustrating because it was such a small, stupid thing, really. People touched each other all the time, in many different contexts. People, even complete strangers, had always touched him, and it had never bothered him. He'd never even thought about it before, really. But that was all…before. Before he'd been injected into a mass of flesh that felt _everything_, in ways that he'd never before experienced and that tended to overwhelm him completely. Even the feel of the sheet sliding against his exposed skin was too much sometimes, making him avoid moving too much, making him want to escape to some place where nothing touched him and he touched nothing. Sensory deprivation sounded like a small piece of heaven to him.

Being able to experience tactile input had never been a consideration in his development. He needed to be able to see, to hear, even to smell, in a way, and those senses in the body that he was currently wearing were actually far less acute than the senses to which he was accustomed. His vision, so he'd discovered the first time that he'd attempted to read the stack of books that Peter had brought to him, was impaired even by human standards. But once he'd adjusted to the differences – which wasn't entirely difficult since he had a frame of reference for those senses – it made processing such input much easier for him. But it would have been pointless, even counterproductive, for a bulletproof car to be able to feel the stinging impact of a bullet. Or the impact of anything, really. As horribly damaged as his body had been in the wake of his collision with Goliath, he had _felt_ nothing – Nothing physical, at any rate – neither during the collision nor after it. Looking back, he knew now that it had been the first time that he'd experienced genuine fear, both for Michael and for himself, and that had been startling, as if the horrific impact had jarred something in his CPU that had never been meant to be jarred, subsequently releasing in him something that had never been meant to be released. But from a physical, tactile perspective, there'd been nothing. He'd been as numb as he'd always been. As he had always been meant to be. As he had always _wanted_ to be.

So before, he'd known when people had touched him mostly because he'd seen them do it, because he'd been able to see all around himself, in all directions and for very long distances, much farther than even the sharpest human eye could see. Or sometimes, there'd be a certain amount of auditory input that went along with the physical contact, the soft slap of fragile human flesh against his unyielding, practically indestructible body when someone would offer him an affectionate pat. Before, he'd loved being touched. It had made him feel accepted as a living being rather than as a thing because while people touched things, living and otherwise, all the time, they touched living things differently than they touched inanimate objects. The people who were important to him, those whose opinion he cared about, had always touched him the same way they touched other living beings, and it had made him feel more connected. Loved, even. An equal. But now, instead of making him feel connected to those around him, being touched made him want to pull away from the overwhelming input that the contact generated, which he couldn't control and which he still had little idea of how to process.

He was trying not to pull away from Angelo now, as Angelo gently held on to his arm. He meant to offer comfort, Kitt knew. It was what one human naturally did when another, especially one about whom they cared, was upset. Kitt was trying, desperately, to keep that in mind as he fought the almost overpowering urge to violently yank his arm out of Angelo's exceedingly gentle grasp.

"I know, baby," Angelo was murmuring quietly and, indeed, comfortingly. "And I'm sorry. I shouldn't have teased, not about that. But… The Brains say it'll just take time, is all. You'll get there," he finished encouragingly.

Even with Angelo's hand still wrapped loosely around his arm, Kitt managed to write, _I hope so._ But his distress-labored, shuddering breathing and the fact that he didn't raise his gaze to meet Angelo's told Angelo very clearly that Kitt considered it a vanishingly faint hope, at best.

"Hey," he said consolingly but firmly, needing Kitt to listed to him and to believe him, "if Bonnie says it's so, then you _know_ it's so. End of story. 'Specially 'cuz Dr. Brain is seconding her."

Kitt did look up then, and he tried valiantly to smile, or at least to show some level of appreciation for Angelo's attempt at comfort, but the effort was mostly drowned in the heavy wash of fear and misery that was otherwise dominating his expression. He looked down again as he began to write, repeating an _I hope so, _and then adding, his expression desolate and forlorn,_ But the thought of months in here is unbearable. I can't do it, Angelo. I can't. I know that I have no choice in the matter, but I can't._

His heart constricting with empathy, Angelo slid his hand down farther, this time wrapping it around Kitt's hand, pen and all. He squeezed his hand lightly, and he watched as Kitt sucked in a gaspy breath in response. He felt the sudden, panicky tension in the withered muscles underneath his own hand, and he knew that Kitt was struggling against the urge to pull away. He figured that Kitt would eventually lose the struggle, if only because up until that point he'd always ultimately given in to the urge to pull away. Angelo began to pull his hand away, so as not to upset Kitt further…and was amazed when Kitt's other hand whipped across his body and clamped like a vice onto his forearm, forestalling his retreat. Angelo was further amazed when, instead of pulling his hand away from Angelo's, Kitt instead let his precious pen, his only means of communication, drop. And then, with a deeply determined expression his face, he turned his hand over under Angelo's, lacing their fingers together so that he could echo the squeeze.

Aside from briefly sharing the squeeze that Kitt had offered, Angelo sat absolutely still, saying nothing, scarcely breathing, even, for fear of shattering the moment. More than anything, he did not want to upset whatever delicate balance Kitt had managed to find that had allowed him to do what he was doing. Kitt stared down at their entwined fingers, meanwhile, taking care to note the contrast of his own very white skin against the suntanned bronze of Angelo's. He concentrated fiercely on the visual input and on listening to and deliberately slowing his breathing in order to better distract himself from the tactile input that he was receiving and, to his utter surprise, the tactic worked fairly well. He didn't pull away, and his shuddery, panicky breathing slowly settled into a normal rhythm as he stared down at his and Angelo's hands. Encouraged and emboldened, Angelo reached out with his free hand, using the tip of his index finger to lift Kitt's chin, locking their gazes together.

"You _can_ do it," he said quietly but very firmly to Kitt. "Because if I've learned one thing about you over the years, it's that you can do _anything _you set your mind to."

Kitt smiled at Angelo wanly in response, a game half-smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. Still, it was a more heartfelt effort than anything he'd managed so far. Angelo smiled back at him and released Kitt's hand, moving his own to briefly stroke it over the soft, dense layer of black peach fuzz that blanketed Kitt's head before he broke the contact between them entirely. He sat back a bit and then noticed Peter standing in the doorway off to his left, watching the two of them. He was framed in the doorway arch and backlit by the light from the corridor behind him. He was carrying at least three heavily-laden paper grocery bags. Angelo beckoned him inside.

"Besides," he said to Kitt at the same time, "it seems to me that you just haven't had the chance to experience any of the _benefits_ of humanity."

Kitt, who'd been watching Peter curiously, returned his attention to Angelo then, giving him a deeply dubious frown. He picked up the pen that he'd dropped and wrote, _Such as?_ As he finished writing, he regarded Angelo with an inquisitively-raised eyebrow.

Angelo looked at the words on the page, shrugged, and mildly answered, "Sex, of course. What else?"

At that, Kitt sighed and rolled his eyes. It was something he'd quickly mastered because, between Michael's fussing, Bonnie's mother-henning, and Angelo's odd proclivities, he'd had plenty of opportunities to practice it.

Angelo grinned at Kitt's reaction as he added, "Yeah, one step at a time is probably a good plan. And," he finished, "as it turns out, just a step or two below sex is food. Which, when done right, can be _almost_ as good as sex. Sometimes better, even."

Kitt gave him another dubious look, this one even more dubious than the last one.

_I've had food,_ he wrote.

And he had, because the feeding tube that had been inserted into his belly had been one of the first things to go once he'd fully regained consciousness and Jessica and the nurses had begun the slow process of de-tubing him. He was down to just a few disagreeable things sticking into his body in various locations now. So, food had quickly become something of a necessity.

Angelo, meanwhile, was snickering at what Kitt had written.

"Oh, you have so not had _food_, baby," he proclaimed. "You've had sustenance. And trust me, there's a huge, _huge_ difference between mere sustenance and actual, honest-to-God food. Isn't that right, love?" he suddenly asked of Peter, who had moved into the room and was setting down his grocery bag burden on a convenient coffee table, which he then carefully pulled closer to the bed.

"Absolutely," Peter absently confirmed, although he truly hadn't been paying much attention to what Angelo had been saying. He was too busy poking around in the bags for a moment, taking a quick inventory, and then announcing that he was off to scrounge up some plates and silverware.

Angelo hopped off the edge of Kitt's bed then and went to work unpacking the bags that Peter had delivered. As usual, he talked while he worked, hardly pausing for breath. Also as usual, Kitt sat back and just listened to him talk.

"So I figured," Angelo said, "that it was about damned time you had some real food. I mean, you're better off that you might have been, since you're not in an actual hospital and all where you'd have to eat, God forbid, hospital food. But still, you're not getting real food. So I went and called up my baby sister Teresa. She's, like, the only person in my family who doesn't think that me n' Peter are gonna go straight to hell, and she used to be the best damned cook in Brooklyn, after my mama, until she lost her mind last year, got married, and then moved out here, where her husband's from. So now she's probably the best damned cook in LA. And I told her that I had this friend who hadn't had real food in, like…Well, ever, _and_ that this friend needed some serious fattening up. She was happy to oblige. And don't worry," he abruptly interjected, pausing to give Kitt a reassuring look over his shoulder, "there's no meat. I gave Tee very specific instructions." Finished unpacking, Angelo turned fully back to Kitt, who was giving him a questioning look. "Luckily for you," Angelo finished with a grin, "Italian stuff ain't half bad without bits and pieces of dead animals in it."

Kitt gave Angelo an amused smirk. He was already used to the ribbing he was getting over his refusal to eat meat simply because it was, in his mind, akin to cannibalism. Angelo had laughed gleefully as he'd translated that particular protest. Michael, on the other hand, had rolled his eyes and then, with the near-infinite patience with Kitt's idiosyncrasies that he'd developed over the years, he'd calmly countered that Kitt wasn't a chicken. To which Kitt had replied, his extreme distaste obvious even in writing, that he was suddenly far too close to being one for comfort. Michael quite logically rebutted that he was also a lot closer to being a tomato, but that argument hadn't persuaded Kitt in the slightest. And although Michael, as the devoted carnivore that he was, continued his efforts of persuasion, Kitt was equally determined that he wasn't going to budge from his philosophical position, not even by a millimeter.

"So now," Angelo was saying, meanwhile, "Tee thinks you're some kinda bizarre California health food nut or somethin', but she made us a nice dinner anyway." Seeing Peter reenter the room with a stack of plates topped with a pile of small bowls that in turn cradled a messy tangle of silverware, he loudly and pointedly added, "And luckily for us, the love of my life graciously agreed to go and pick it up."

Peter snorted at that as he set his pile on the table amongst the food that Angelo had unpacked and then set about the business of serving.

"I thought _he_ was the love of your life," he said, jokingly jerking his head in Kitt's direction as he worked.

"Oh no, darling. That's lust," Angelo drawled in reply, with a teasing grin aimed right at Kitt. "There's a difference, y'know?"

Peter snorted again and answered, "Not with you, there isn't."

Angelo snickered at that while Kitt rolled his eyes – again – and flopped back against the head of his bed. Poking him playfully, Angelo teased, "Oh, don't go doin' the martyred thing, you! You know you love me."

Kitt answered him with an ambiguous look, neither confirming Angelo's assertion nor denying it, and then he was distracted by Peter handing him a loaded plate, which held a chunk of lasagna that had to be eight inches thick, dripping with thick, fragrant sauce and spinach-infused ricotta, along with a few side dishes and a hunk of bread. Kitt set about inspecting it closely. Angelo, as was his wont, quickly became impatient.

"Christ, don't just sit there lookin' at it!_ Mangiare, mio piccolo amore, mangiare!" _he insisted. When Kitt looked up and gave him a blank look in response, Angelo frowned back at him for a moment and then remembered, "Oh, right! Italian's AWOL at the moment, isn't it? Shame, really," he added with a theatric sigh and a shake of his head. "I mean, it's a fun language to be pissy in and all, and I'm thinkin' you could really use that right about now."

Kitt actually managed something of a laugh at that. They did have a tendency to yell at each other in Italian, when one or the other of them was in a pissy mood. Usually, that was Kitt because, if he was spending a lot of time with Angelo, it usually meant that he'd been banged up, and that tended to make him a bit cranky.

_Very true_, Kitt answered, his demeanor suddenly melancholy. _I miss it. I miss many things, in fact._

"Hey!" Angelo responded, giving Kitt a quick poke to ward off the somber mood that was suddenly threatening. As Kitt blinked at him with a little confused frown on his face, Angelo added. "You need to be thinkin' about what you've gained, not about what you've lost." As Kitt's frown deepened, Angelo answered the snarky "Like what?" that he knew was crossing Kitt's mind, saying, "Like the ability to appreciate a nice, thick, messy slice of lasagna, is what. Eat!" he insisted again, gesturing at the untouched plate that was still nestled in Kitt's lap.

Kitt could be obedient when he wanted to be. He regarded his meal uncertainly for a moment before moving determinedly forward. He still wasn't exactly skilled with eating utensils, but he managed to dissect a piece of lasagna with his fork and then managed to transfer the morsel to his mouth without making a mess. And once that was accomplished and the taste began to register with him, his already large eyes flew even wider, and he gave Angelo a look that clearly communicated that he was suddenly enjoying himself. Immensely.

"Uh-huh!" Angelo responded delightedly, grinning massively. "Y'see? _That's_ what I'm talkin' 'bout, baby!"

Kitt didn't bother to answer and not only because he couldn't eat and "talk" at the same time. He just proceeded to enthusiastically devour everything on his plate at breakneck speed.

"Easy there," Peter advised after a moment of watching him in deep amusement, "or you're just going to make yourself sick. And then it will all come back up faster than it went down. Trust me, that's not nearly so pleasant."

Kitt gave Peter an alarmed look, and he deliberately slowed down, but he certainly didn't stop. As his attention refocused wholly on discovering real food for the first time, Peter smiled with still-amused affection at him and then moved to settle on the edge of the bed, close behind Angelo. He wrapped both arms around Angelo's waist, pulled him closer, snuffled his nose through his thick, wavy hair and into his ear in just the way that he knew Angelo liked, and whispered at him, "You can be quite wonderful when you want to be, you know."

"Mmmm," Angelo murmured appreciatively at the snuffling. He was somewhat surprised by it, even, because Peter wasn't often so publicly demonstrative. And then he added a cheeky, "I know."

Peter snorted against his ear and pointed out, "Of course, the rest of the time you're an utter brat."

Angelo smiled, reaching back to pat Peter's cheek. And then he ruffled his fingers through Peter's short ginger curls as he confidently asserted, "Yes, but you like me that way."

Peter leaned in still closer and murmured breathily into his ear, "All too true, darling."

Angelo's smile widened as he playfully murmured back, "You'd better quit before we give Kitt more than a culinary education."

"Well, it _certainly_ wouldn't be the first time," Peter playfully reminded him, not pulling away at all. "Need I remind you of that time when we—"

"Yeah, yeah," Angelo hurriedly interrupted. "But that was…different." He couldn't exactly articulate _how_ it was different. Kitt was Kitt no matter what physical form he was injected into. But it really _was_ different, suddenly.

Peter sighed against Angelo's ear, meanwhile, sending a shiver skittering down Angelo's spine, and whispered, "Later, then."

"Not too much later, I hope," Angelo responded, looking up to give him a toothy, promise-filled grin as Peter pulled away and stood up. And then he noticed that Kitt was staring at them. "What're _you_ lookin' at?" he playfully teased. "Jealous?" Kitt thought about that for a moment and then shrugged what was obviously a "maybe" at him. Angelo chuckled in response after taking a moment to be surprised, and he looked over at Peter, who was loading up a plate for himself, and teased, "Maybe you oughta go whisper in _his_ ear, babe."

Peter smiled as he busily refilled Kitt's plate

"Maybe I ought to," he agreed as he worked. He turned back to Kitt after a moment, handed him his reloaded plate, winked at him, and said, "Maybe _he_ wouldn't go all disappointingly bashful on me."

Angelo smirked at that while Kitt made an exaggeratedly contemplative face, in response to which Peter gave him a wolfish grin and a lascivious waggle of his eyebrows. Angelo took it all in and playfully sputtered at Peter, "Hey! Stop horning in on my territory!"

Peter snorted at that as he busied himself with loading up a plate for Angelo.

"'Horning' is certainly an appropriate word, when it comes to you," he said, and Angelo gave him a shameless grin as he took the plate that Peter offered to him.

And then the three of them settled down into their extravagantly rich meal.

* * *

><p>A decadently rich cheesecake capped off the meal and as Kitt happily wallowed in the throes of utterly sated gastronomic ecstasy in its aftermath, Angelo lounged back on the edge of the bed, supporting his upper body with one hand behind him while happily patting his overstuffed tummy with the other. Peter had disappeared again, for the moment; just before he'd left, he'd been muttering something about finding something to store leftovers in.<p>

"Really," Angelo opined around a happy sigh, "all this stuff just ain't done right without a fantastic Chianti to go with it. But," he added with a languid waving gesture at the IV pole attached to Kitt's bed, from which a generous array of bags still dangled, "I figured that alcohol wouldn't play real well with your little pharmacy there."

Kitt lazily craned his neck backwards against the head of the bed that he was leaning against in order to look up at the IV pole. A rueful expression crossed his face, and he answered, having finally exchanged his fork for his pen, _Probably not._

"So," Angelo cheerfully continued, "next time. When you're off all that crap and can get your skinny little ass outta here. We'll go someplace nice, even. Like, someplace where the tablecloths aren't made of paper."

Kitt smiled at that, a smile that was even creeping toward being a wholly genuine one.

_And where they don't serve the Chianti in paper cups, I trust? _he teased.

Angelo glanced at what he'd written and answered, "Yeah, maybe that, too. If you're a good boy, that is."

_I'm always good,_ Kitt proclaimed, leveling a challenging gaze at Angelo. _Very good, even. _He underlined the word "very" for emphasis.

Angelo smirked at that and teased, "I'll be the judge of that, if you don't mind."  
>Kitt raised an eyebrow at him, and wrote, <em>Are you asking me out on a date, Gianelli?<em>

Angelo leaned forward again to see what Kitt had written, and then he looked up to nail Kitt with a brilliant grin.

"Well," he teased, "I figure it's much more polite than just climbing up on that bed and having my sweaty way with you." While Kitt snorted at that, Angelo added, "Besides, you know what they say, baby: The way to man's heart is through his stomach." And while Kitt rolled his eyes yet again at that, Angelo added, "So am I maybe halfway there yet?"

_Halfway where?_ Kitt asked, giving Angelo an exaggeratedly clueless look, complete with vacant blinking.

"To your heart, you dope!" Angelo exasperatedly clarified, playfully throwing a wadded-up napkin at him, which Kitt reflexively dodged. "I _did_ bring you cheesecake and all, y'know," he reminded Kitt, and he even resorted to regarding him with large and deeply-brown puppy-dog eyes. He knew they were very hard to resist. Even when he'd been a kid he'd usually gotten whatever he wanted with them. Usually.

Unfortunately for him, Kitt was an expert at digging in his heels and offering all kinds of stubborn resistance to just about anything that he wanted to resist.

_Peter brought me cheesecake,_ he pointed out. _Not you._ And then he crossed his arms over his bony chest, which consisted of thin skin stretched over a convex xylophone of ribs and a pair of very prominent collarbones. He gave Angelo a triumphantly self-satisfied smirk.

Angelo read what Kitt had written, and his face immediately fell into a pout.

"Well, yeah, if ya wanna get all _literal_ about it," he petulantly protested, knowing how much Kitt hated being accused of being overly literal. "But it was _my_ idea." He continued to pout at Kitt until Kitt finally relented, heaving a surrendering sigh.

_All right, fine,_ he conceded. _You're maybe a sixteenth of the way there. Maybe,_ he reiterated, again underlining the word for emphasis. He paused then, unconsciously biting down on his lower lip as he narrowed his eyes and thoughtfully tapped his chin with his pen for a moment. Then he added with a teasing sidelong glance at Angelo_, A lot more cheesecake might just get you farther faster, you know._

Angelo read what he'd written and then, lifting his head, he also lifted two surprised eyebrows at Kitt while giving him a wide grin.

"Well, hell, baby!" he responded delightedly. "If _that's_ all it takes, I'll bring you one a day until you closely resemble a beached whale."

Kitt snorted at that and countered, _But then you wouldn't want to have your sweaty way with me._

Angelo leaned in close then, almost intimately close, and he answered, "Oh, don't bet on it, sweetheart. Looks ain't everything."

And in response, Kitt smiled. It was tentative at first, but it slowly grew until it was big enough that his eyes almost disappeared, subsumed by the upper edges of his high Slavic cheekbones. It was then that Angelo discovered that Kitt possessed a set of killer dimples that were strong enough to show even though his face currently lacked greatly in the flesh department. And it was then that Angelo fell in love…or at least much more deeply in lust.

It was also then that Michael poked his head into the room, with Bonnie in tow.

"What's all this?" Michael asked, frowning curiously around himself.

Angelo gave Michael a little wave in response as he sat back from Kitt a little. But Kitt…

Kitt turned his head and gave Michael a smile. It was one of genuine, sublime happiness, and it lit up his thin, pale face as it hadn't yet been lit. It was a complete turnaround from his almost sullen mood earlier, before Michael had left him to seek out Bonnie. Kitt had always been one to shift moods on a dime, of course, sometimes going from completely sulky to wildly ecstatic in the dizzying space of a few seconds. He wasn't human, and what he felt affected him differently than it would have affected a human being. He processed everything, including emotion, differently than a human being did, and he did it in ways that Michael didn't understand at all, that maybe no one really understood. Not even Bonnie. Not even Kitt himself. His computer brain moved at a speed that Michael couldn't even begin to comprehend, and over the years he had become used to Kitt's rapid and sometimes erratic cycling between emotional peaks and valleys.

But this…This was almost breathtaking, perhaps because Kitt had never been quite so visual before. Before, his state of mind had expressed itself in how rapidly he spoke, and in the tone of his synthesized voice, and in the lengths and qualities of his silences. There were no gestures. No expressions. No scowls or tears and certainly no smiles. About the closest he could come to such visual cues was to vary the sweep speed of the Trans Am's front scanner. But now, all of a sudden, Kitt looked so happy that Michael was immediately and powerfully loath to ruin his first good mood since he'd fully awakened and had had to start reconciling himself with an entirely different kind of existence. He'd had to come down out of the stratosphere and plod along with the mere mortals for a while, perhaps for a long while, and although Michael truly couldn't imagine what that was like for Kitt, he knew that it was difficult. And he suddenly felt no need to make it even more difficult.

So, Michael decided that he wasn't going to tell Kitt about what he'd been up to for most of the day and what he'd discovered. It could wait, he decided, at least until the next day. He exchanged a quick glance with Bonnie, whose expression clearly indicated that she'd already reached the same conclusion that Michael had reached, and they shared a quick nod of mutual understanding.

"This," Angelo was answering Michael meanwhile, "is food." He gestured expansively at the mostly-empty serving dishes scattered around. "Figured it was about damned time."

"It certainly smells like food," Michael agreed. "And we're starving," he added.

"Help yourselves," Angelo replied. "There's no meat, though," he warned with a teasing smirk at Michael.

"Of course there isn't," Michael sighed, rolling his eyes theatrically. But he managed to construct an impressive array of edibles on a plate, anyway.

* * *

><p>"Jessica is going to kill you, you know," Michael mildly informed Angelo sometime later, as the impromptu gathering was obviously winding down and the few remaining leftovers had been packed away. He took a bite of his second wedge of cheesecake, murmured at least his tenth blissfully reverent, "Oh my God" of the evening as it went down, and then added, "And knowing her, she'll probably find some horrible, slow way to do it, too. Like, drilling a thousand tiny holes into your skull so that your brain slowly leaks out."<p>

"Pffft!" Angelo disdainfully snorted as he plopped himself down onto the couch that Michael had rather claimed as his own, having spent so many hours on it while Kitt had still been unconscious. "What brain? I'm pretty sure I have the lowest IQ in the room."

"Oh, I dunno about that," Michael answered doubtfully. "I think I might be able to give you a run for your money."

Angelo snickered in response and said, "Well, whatever. I'm also pretty sure that I can take a five-foot-tall woman who weighs like half as much as I do, no matter how pissed off she is. Plus," he finished with a waving gesture in Kitt's direction as Michael chuckled, "the boy just needs _food_, for God's sake, before he wastes away to nothing before our very eyes."

"Spoken like a true Italian," Michael answered over his chuckling.

"Well, only about half, actually," Angelo corrected with a dismissive shrug. "But the other half's mostly Cuban, and they're just as bad with the whole food-pushing thing." And then he suddenly shifted on the couch to lean in closer, conspiratorially close, to Michael. He jerked his chin subtly at Kitt, who'd fallen asleep curled up into a little ball, lying on his side. He had a happy little smile on his face, and as Bonnie set about fussing over him, tucking him in while Peter supervised the operation, Angelo lowered his voice and added, "Besides, seeing that look on that face is well worth a slow, torturous death."

"You know something?" Michael answered as he followed Angelo's gesture and then smiled affectionately at the peacefully slumbering Kitt, as Bonnie leaned down to plant a maternal kiss on his upturned cheek. "I think you're right."

* * *

><p><em><strong>And now, as promisedthreatened, some review replies. :O)**_

_**itsfinnmcmissile**__**:**__Realism – or at least a vague semblance thereof – is indeed my goal, so I'm glad you appreciate it. Other people have done this sort of thing before, of course, but I always felt that the transition was all too easy, on many different levels. Or maybe it's just that I like to make things difficult for poor wittle AIs. ;)_

_**GuardPuppy:**__Hugging time is getting closer, never fear. :) And I do hope that you do continue the translation, although I'm thinking it's kind of a difficult one to work on. Perhaps frustrating, too; there's a lot of colloquial language in this story that might not necessarily translate well. So…my apologies. But I did enjoy reading what you've translated so far! So far as I can tell (My German is far from perfect these days, I'm afraid), it seems pretty faithful._

_**Melody Phoenix:**__ There's a reason that Angelo knows Russian. Well, two reasons, actually. One is that he just likes languages. The other…will be revealed. :) I mean, it's not a major plot point or anything like that. It's just a cute little reason why he speaks it._

_**Emperatrizdelanoche:**__ There was a time when I used to think in one language and speak in another and write in yet another. Unfortunately, that time is long past, and languages are something that you either use or lose. I've pretty much lost them all, or at least I've lost most of all of them. My best non-English language is probably still German at this point._

_And yes, for the most part, facial expressions are instinctive behaviors, so it made sense to me that Kitt would master them fairly quickly. Faster than he'd master speech, for sure. Writing the mute Kitt has made me realize how difficult writing a character who can't speak can be. I'm cheating a little because I'm letting him write, but still…_

_**Bookworm Gal:**__ Whatever language Kitt is "speaking," he's still Kitt. That's actually something that's important to me in this particular story, keeping him (mostly) in character even though his world's been turned upside down. And, in some ways, it's only going to get worse for the poor wittle guy…_

_**Jalaperilo:**__ Snark is hard to write when one of the characters can't speak! *laughs* But yes, the boy's awake now, so now it's time for the "fun" to begin. And I'm gratified to hear that you still like Angelo even when in an "I hate OCs" phase. Believe me, I know what that sort of phase is like. :) I kinda like him, myself. Well, OK, I'm sort of in love with him, really, but I'm afraid that's kinda what happens to me when I go whole-hog into an OC._


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